With a growing global trend of rural to urban migration, a focus on an understanding of parks, gardens and general green space in city centers is more important than ever. While a move to an urban center can offer improved access to employment, schooling, healthcare and cultural opportunities, it can come at a cost of increased stress and noise and decreased access to open space, fresh air and nature. For urban and forestry researcher Phillipp Gärtner, this raised the question of which European capital cities have the greenest space.

Using a method that processes satellite imagery and detects pixel types, Gärtner has generated the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for 43 of Europe’s capital cities. The NDVI analyses remote sensing measurements to determine whether a target area contains live vegetation or not. For consistency, the area analyzed is a 5-mile radius circle around each city's official city center.

The results tend to be weighted towards the smaller capitals as they generally have less metropolitan area. Coastal cities feature on the low end of the scale due to the non-plantable area so Gärtner has compiled a list of both cities with a population of above two million and the greenest seaside capital.

Here are the rankings from most green to least green:

Sarajevo - 0.6778

Vaduz - 0.6738

Ljubljana - 0.6114

Andorra La Vella - 0.6074

Bern - 0.5996

Luxembourg - 0.5801

Vilnius - 0.5137

Tallin - 0.459

Monaco - 0.4395

Oslo - 0.4356

Riga - 0.4238

Zagreb - 0.4121

Bratislava - 0.4043

Chisinau - 0.3926

Kiev - 0.3887

Stockholm - 0.3777

Helsinki - 0.3769

Prague - 0.3692

Warsaw - 0.3653

Pristina - 0.3535

Sofia - 0.3379

Skopje - 0.3105

Belgrade - 0.295

Dublin - 0.291

Tirana - 0.2793

Minsk - 0.2718

Copenhagen - 0.2637

Reykjavik - 0.2637

Berlin - 0.2519

Bucharest - 0.2519

Podgorica - 0.2363

Amsterdam - 0.2285

Brussels - 0.1973

Vienna - 0.1738

Rome - 0.1699

Madrid - 0.1543

Moscow - 0.1426

London - 0.1348

Lisbon - 0.127

Paris - 0.1191

Valetta - 0.0957

Athens - 0.0879

The full analysis can be found here.