In South Korea, one of the current environmental issues is reducing and mitigating particulate matters in living areas, particularly in urban areas. As this problem is engaged with the recent social and national atmosphere that interest in urban greens or urban forests has been increased, it is highly expected that urban forest plays a significant role in effectively managing particulate matters by the public. However, there is lack of monitoring sensors practically set up around human respiratory organs or 1.5 to 2 meters above ground. In this paper, the effects of the vertical location of sensors and the vegetation structure of urban forest on the changes in particulate matter 10 (PM10) concentrations was addressed as a pilot-test. Seoul Forest located in Seoul, was a study site and is a flat and open place. PM10 data were collected from September to October 2017 for analyzing the difference with time between two sites’ PM10 concentration by location of sensor – Family Park and Seongdong-gu air pollution monitoring station, and from November 2017 to January 2018 for the difference between three sites’ by vegetation structure – Eco Park, Family Park and a residential area. The data were statistically analyzed using repeated measured ANOVA.
Results/Conclusions
The result showed the PM10 concentration at Family Park with lower setting of the sensor was higher than that of Seongdong-gu station with the higher one, but each pattern of PM10 concentration was not different. PM10 concentration at Eco Park having dense vegetation cover indicated slightly lower value than Family Park mainly of grassland, and the neighboring residential area of no vegetation was the highest value among them. Although the order of three different sites by PM10 concentration was sometimes inconsistent within a given time period, one obvious pattern found in this study was that green places were more stable than no vegetation area. As PM10 includes a range of different types of particles in it, analysis on the source of PM10 is one of the important follow-up research topics: particularly, physical responses of particulate matters with regard to relative humidity. For the detailed interpretation of such result, it is necessary for collecting data about various meteorological parameters and environmental factors, by setting up relevant sensors considering human respiratory mechanism. Conclusively, with sufficient data collection, a systematic approach to analyzing the correlation between PM10 and urban forest can be possible, considering the outputs from this research.