abstract: During summer 2014, a study was conducted as part of the Landscape Architecture Foundation Case Study Investigation to analyze features of three sustainably designed landscapes. Each project was located in a southwest desert city: Civic Space Park in Phoenix, AZ, the Pete V. Domenici US Courthouse Sustainable Landscape Retrofit in Albuquerque, NM, and George "Doc" Cavalliere Park in Scottsdale, AZ. The principal components of each case study were performance benefits that quantified ongoing ecosystem services. Performance benefits were developed from data provided by the designers and collected by the research team. The functionality of environmental, social, and economic sustainable features was evaluated. In southwest desert cities achieving performance benefits such as microclimate cooling often come at the cost of water conservation. In each of these projects such tradeoffs were balanced by prioritizing the project goals and constraints. During summer 2015, a study was conducted to characterize effects of tree species and shade structures on outdoor human thermal comfort under hot, arid conditions. Motivating the research was the hypothesis that tree species and shade structures will vary in their capacity to improve thermal comfort due to their respective abilities to attenuate solar radiation. Micrometeorological data was collected in full sun and under shade of six landscape tree species and park ramadas in Phoenix, AZ during pre-monsoon summer afternoons. The six landscape tree species included: Arizona ash (Fraxinus velutina Torr.), Mexican palo verde (Parkinsonia aculeata L.), Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis Mill.), South American mesquite (Prosopis spp. L.), Texas live oak (Quercus virginiana for. fusiformis Mill.), and Chinese elm (Ulmus parvifolia Jacq.). Results showed that the tree species and ramadas were not similarly effective at improving thermal comfort, represented by physiologically equivalent temperature (PET). The difference between PET in full sun and under shade was greater under Fraxinus and Quercus than under Parkinsonia, Prosopis, and ramadas by 2.9-4.3 °C. Radiation was a significant driver of PET (p<0.0001, R2=0.69) and with the exception of ramadas, lower radiation corresponded with lower PET. Variations observed in this study suggest selecting trees or structures that attenuate the most solar radiation is a potential strategy for optimizing PET. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Applied Biological Sciences 2016

It is believed that the extremely hot European summer in 2003, where tens of thousands died in buildings, will become the norm by the 2040s, and hence there is the urgent need to accurately assess the risk that buildings pose. Thermal simulations based on warmer than typical years will be key to this. Unfortunately, the existing warmer than typical years, such as probabilistic Design Summer Years (pDSYs) are not robust measures due to their simple selection method, and can even be cooler than typical years. This study developed two new summer reference years: one (pHSY-1) is suitable for assessing the occurrence and severity of overheating while the other (pHSY-2) is appropriate for evaluating the thermal stress. Both have been proven to be more robust than the pDSYs. In addition, this study investigated the spatial variation in overheating driven by variability in building characteristics and the local environment. This variation had been ignored by previous studies, as most of them either created thermal models using building archetypes with little or no concern about the influence of local shading, or assumed little variation in climate across a landscape. For the first time, approximately a thousand more accurate thermal models were created for a UK city based on the remote measurement including building characteristics and their local shading. By producing overheating and mortality maps this study found that spatial variation in the risk of overheating was considerably higher due to the variability of vernacular forms, contexts and climates than previously thought, and that the heat-related mortality will be tripled by the 2050s if no building and human thermal adaptations are taken. Such maps would be useful to Governments when making cost-effective adaptation strategies against a warming climate.