Vegetation cover in relation to socioeconomic factors in a tropical city assessed from sub-meter resolution imagery

Fine-scale information about urban vegetation and social-ecological relationships is crucial to inform both urban planning and ecological research, and high spatial resolution imagery is a valuable tool for assessing urban areas. However, urban ecology and remote sensing have largely focused on cities in temperate zones. Our goal was to characterize urban vegetation cover with sub-meter resolution aerial imagery, and identify social-ecological relationships of urban vegetation patterns in a tropical city, the San Juan Metropolitan Area, Puerto Rico. Our specific objectives were to: i) map vegetation cover using sub-meter spatial resolution (0.3 m) imagery; ii) quantify the amount of residential and non-residential vegetation; and iii) investigate the relationship between patterns of urban vegetation versus socioeconomic and environmental factors. We found that 61% of the San Juan Metropolitan Area was green, and that our combination of high spatial resolution imagery and object-based cl...