Construction of Water Corridors for Mitigation of Urban Heat Island Effect

The urban heat island (UHI) effect is becoming increasingly prominent owing to accelerated urbanization in Fuzhou, affecting the lives of people. Water is an important landscape element that can effectively improve the urban thermal environment. The construction of water corridors has been proven to mitigate the intensity of the UHI effect in Fuzhou. Therefore, we obtained the distribution of a water system in Fuzhou from image data and analyzed temperature watersheds using the inversion of surface temperature to investigate the inner mechanism of the water system influencing the UHI effect. The water system was superimposed with hot spots to obtain cooling ecological nodes and construct water corridors to mitigate the UHI effect. The temperature watershed areas in Fuzhou are: Minhou County (353.77 km2), Changle (233.06 km2), Mawei (137.82 km2), Cangshan (71.25 km2), Jin’an (55.99 km2), Gulou (16.93 km2), and Taijiang (15.51 km2) Districts. Hot spots were primarily located in Changle, Cangshan, Jin’an, Gulou, and Taijiang Districts. The superposition of the water system and temperature watershed yielded 152 cooling ecological nodes, which were concentrated in the Minjiang and Wulong River watershed, with no cooling ecological nodes distributed within the central city. Twenty-five cooling ecological nodes were selected in the hot spot areas, which were primarily distributed in reservoirs, inland rivers, and park water systems. We constructed 12 water corridors, including four, three, two, one, one, and one in the Minhou County, Changle, Mawei, Jin’an, Cangshan, and the Gulou and Taijiang Districts.