Abstract: In recent years, urban environmental pollution has become increasingly prominent and attracts widespread attention. Urban trees have the potential to trap dust and help to alleviate this type of environmental pollution. In particular, urban trees play an extremely important role in their capacity to trap dust. However, there is a lack of systematic research on the ability of urban trees to retain dust. Many researchers use different methods to screen, sort and grade tree species that have a strong ability to retain dust and optimize the allocation structure to explore these mechanisms. The differences in the methods currently used in these studies have resulted in a lack of reference for these studies. Therefore, the focus of the next step of this research is to combine and extend the effect of urban trees to retain dust using different multi-scale and multi-dimensional methods. Success with this goal should enable more comprehensive, reliable and practical methods for the evaluation of the further researches on this topic, including those on measurements, mechanisms, temporal and spatial characteristics, environmental impact factors and other influencing factors. The final goal of this paper is to address the existing problems of retention of dust by urban trees and the prospects for future research.

Key words: urban trees, dust retention, effect, mechanism, environmental factors