New Taipei City and Taipei have the lowest percentage of urban greenery among Taiwan’s six special municipalities, the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute said on Tuesday, citing data obtained by Formosat-5, the nation’s first domestically developed satellite.
An artificial intelligence-assisted survey of the six cities showed that Tainan has the highest greenery coverage ratio of about 32 percent, or 5,888 hectares, followed by 26 percent in Taoyuan (806 hectares), 21 percent in Taichung (2,106 hectares), 19 percent in Kaohsiung (3,112 hectares), 18 percent in Taipei (1,864 hectares) and 15 percent in New Taipei City (2,067 hectares), the institute said.
The survey is part of a research project commissioned by the Council of Agriculture to assess urban forests, institute deputy director Wu Meng-lin (吳孟玲) said, adding that the level of greenery affects the quality of a city’s living environment.
Photo courtesy of the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute
Past urban greenery surveys focused on parks, but the new tools allow researchers to analyze greenery more accurately without taking into account a city’s mountainous areas, institute researcher Hsieh Han-chin (謝漢欽) said.
For example, the survey excluded Taipei’s Yangmingshan area (陽明山) and mountain slopes with a gradient above 20 degrees, Hsieh said.
The remote sensing system of Formosat-5, which was launched on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket in 2017, can transmit black-and-white photos in 2m resolution and color photos in 4m resolution, the National Space Organization (NSPO) said.
The satellite is panchromatic, operating in blue, green, red and near-infrared spectral bands, the institute added.
Thanks to the domestically operated satellite, the institute can obtain images for its surveys at low cost, Hsieh said.
However, for a more specific assessment of urban greenery, the institute would need to buy images from other sources, in which it can exactly distinguish trees from grass, Hsieh said, adding that foreign commercial satellite image suppliers can provide images that show objects as small as 50cm.
Formosat-5’s images would mainly be used to observe seasonal changes of forests or monitor large changes on land, he said, adding that the NSPO also provides researchers with images taken in the past.
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