Data from: 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 classification was highly successful for extracting
vegetation cover in a moist tropical city (97% accuracy). In addition,
simple spatial pattern analysis allowed us to separate residential from
non-residential vegetation with 76% accuracy, and patterns of residential
and non-residential vegetation varied greatly across the city. Both
socioeconomic (e.g., population density, building age, detached homes) and
environmental variables (e.g., topography) were important in explaining
variations in vegetation cover in our spatial regression models. However,
important socioeconomic drivers found in cities in temperate zones, such
as income and home value, were not important in San Juan. Climatic and
cultural differences between tropical and temperate cities may result in
different social-ecological relationships. Our study provides novel
information for local land use planners, highlights the value of high
spatial resolution remote sensing data to advance ecological research and
urban planning in tropical cities, and emphasizes the need for more
studies in tropical cities.