## 4 Discussion  
This study shows the need and utility of high-resolution imagery and object-based image analysis to quantify land cover for city neighborhood-level analysis. High-resolution land cover data are essential to understand the relationships between the percentage urban tree canopy cover, demographics, and urban heat islands. These data reveal insights into which neighborhoods have adequate urban forests and where efforts by city planners should be made to manage, restore, and preserve them. The 30-m resolution National Land Cover Dataset for 2019 shows forested land cover for Chattanooga, where = 27% of land cover types, versus 49%, using 50-cm-resolution land cover data derived from Planet SkySat imagery. This confirms that coarser and more available land cover products under-represent UTC in urban environments. The monetary costs of acquiring and processing high-resolution imagery and land cover data to understand UTC should be considered a worthy investment for urban planners that wish to have a full understanding of their urban forests and how they relate to neighborhood residents. One limitation of this study was the availability of high-resolution heat severity data to complement the 50-cm-resolution land cover data used. The Trust for Public Land's heat severity datasets are derived from Landsat at a 30 m resolution, possibly generalizing to heat severity neighborhood-level analysis. From the initial exploratory regression analysis, there is some evidence supporting the hypothesis that income and other demographic variables for Chattanooga are correlated with UTC, as statistical relationships were found; however, the coefficient of determination values illustrated in Figure 10 are too low to draw any definitive conclusions. Still, many other situational factors may also explain these correlations. These low adjusted R-squared values suggest that there is little evidence that these variables predict or influence the  
Figure 9: A map of heat islands for Chattanooga, TN. Areas in red represent mean surface temperatures above the overall mean surface temperature for Chattanooga. Source: Trust for Public Land, 2021.  
amount of UTC. In this local case, it might be that the exceptionally high percentage of urban canopy in Chattanooga skews the results. Additional studies of other urban areas could be conducted to see if overall cities with smaller urban forest percentages show a stronger correlation with the other socioeconomic indicators. More research exploring the variables included in this study, and others, should be conducted from a temporal and spatial perspective to better understand the influence, or lack thereof, between social demographics, environmental characteristics, and UTC for Chattanooga. This study does show, however, some evidence that as the percentage of UTC decreases, the heat severity and heat island effects increase. However, here, too, more research in this area should be conducted in the future to fully understand the influence of UTC and heat islands. It should be noted that trees still bring numerous benefits to people and urban ecosystems, and city planning policies should aim to maintain as much of the tree canopy as possible, regardless of these results. If nothing else, avoiding the expansion of urban heat islands by increasing urban forests aids community resilience to climate change. The lack of relationships among these socioeconomic variables indicates that the UTC coverage is somewhat uniform across neighborhoods and the city should strive to maintain its existing urban forests and increase them where the percentage is low. Figure 10: _Cont_. Figure 10: Scatter plots indicating correlations between urban tree canopy percentage and various variables used in spatial analysis. The distribution and relationships between UTC and people are inherently a geographic problem, and GIS is essential in understanding the relationships and distribution of the two.