Numerous communities throughout the Northeast are receiving federal funding to expand and study urban forests. The Forest Service is spending $1 billion to expand access to trees and greenspaces nationwide.
In New York’s Capital Region, the city of Albany is getting nearly $2 million to prune all 20,000 street trees. Albany is also aiming to plant 2,025 trees by 2025. The city of Glens Falls will use $400,000 to implement a tree management plan and hire an arborist. The University at Albany is getting $5 million to create a Center for Ecosystem-based Climate Adaptation. Massachusetts communities are in line for more than $22 million under the effort. The projects include the planting of more than 15,000 trees in Springfield and implementing an urban forest equity plan in Holyoke.
Andrei Lapenas, a professor in UAlbany’s Department of Geography in Planning, is part of the team leading the school’s participation in the effort. He spoke with WAMC about the goals and what constitutes an urban forest.
Lapenas: There are different definitions of urban forests. Typically, that’s the trees which grow within the jurisdiction, so different municipalities. So parks, trees along roads, that's all urban forest, and everything which grows within the limits of a city can be considered as urban forest. More recently, we also extend this definition on green roofs, because people grow trees on roofs, and even on walls of the buildings, so urban forest, they’re on an expansion right now.
Levulis: And when it comes to an urban forest, what are the benefits of having a healthy one, an expansive one?
Well, that's actually a quite common question. And you know, when I teach introductory course at SUNY Albany and students, often they ask, what's the benefits for trees? And there are some cliche about trees. So trees, they give us most of the oxygen? No, that's not true. Trees, they don't give us most of the oxygen, even if we do away with all forest and all organic material on our planet, oxygen concentration will drop not that much and a little bit more than 1%. And now we have about 20% of oxygen in atmosphere, so it’s only like 19%. Some people also say that we need forests to compensate for industrial activities to sequestrate all this carbon, excessive carbon which goes into atmosphere. That's also not exactly the reason why we would like to expand urban forests. Although forests in general, the global forests, they absorb some amount of carbon from the atmosphere, but they’re far from being you know, kind of deal breakers in this question. Most of this carbon which they absorbed during one season will go back to atmosphere through recycling of tree parts like leaves, needles, small branches, fine roots. It will go as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, much more than just you know, beautification of our streets, we really need this to fight global warming at a regional scale. So, what they really do first of course, obvious one feature is shadow. Temperatures there could be 10-20 degree Fahrenheit cooler. Trees, they also cool the space by providing high rate of evapotranspiration. So, in addition to evaporation, which is a physical process from any water surface, trees also provide transpiration, that's why we call this process of evapotranspiration. And transpiration could be actually larger than evaporation, trees evaporates much faster, they transfer water much faster than you know grass or bushes, and that's why you know, they take the heat from the surface, because of this process of evapotranspiration, so they cool by providing shadows, shade, but also they cool by transplanting water into atmosphere. There are some other benefits of having trees within city limits, so to speak. Trees, they have large root systems which reduces soil erosion. And if you notice over the last recent years, you know, we can definitely see an increase in precipitation and increase in precipitation increases soil erosion actually increases the motion of particles along the surface, and very often that's also accompanied by pollution. So trees, they reduce erosion and they retain pollution at the places where pollution occurred, not spreading it to natural water bodies to rivers and so on. There are some other benefits as well. Especially trees planted as windbreaks. They reduce the pollution of air by dust particles. So they clean the air by capturing these particles and depositing this around the tree. So that's, I guess that's pretty much the main role of trees in kind of an ecosystem services within an urban environment.
So as it pertains to this national effort, this national funding that is occurring from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, researchers at the University at Albany are set to receive $5 million. And a big part of it is going toward this Urban Climate Adaptation of Forest Ecosystems with Disadvantaged Communities and Youth effort. It’s a long title, but what are the main objectives of that effort?
Yeah, the main objective is to set up a center for ecosystem-based climate adaptations. And this center will interact with other organizations including grassroots organizations and with the city of Albany, to improve the urban forest within the city of Albany. To improve urban forests, as well as to educate people about the importance of urban forests and to work with, as you mentioned, with disadvantaged communities. So it's the center for, not only implementation of plans to increase green space within the city of Albany, but also it's the center for education, and special education of disadvantaged youth. As a matter of fact, we proposed to the U.S. Forest Service, to establish the intergenerational committee which will govern this, you know, climate adaptation, ecosystem-based climate adaptation center. And we hope that this will also contribute to the environmental education within the university as well as it will be certain public outreach, it will be public engagement in the environmental field within the upstate New York communities and within the city of Albany.
And to that point, the city of Albany's efforts, the city is receiving almost $2 million from the USDA to undertake pruning of all 20,000 street trees. The city has a goal as well of planting 2,025 trees by 2025. So that's sort of how part of this effort will manifest itself in our region, what people will see as a result of this funding, right?
Well, I think that people will see that Albany will become a much cooler place. So it will become cooler place to be so it's friendlier, greener space, but also improvement in urban forest will literally cool the environment, at least regionally. In that sense, work on this grant, that’s the contribution to increase the resilience of City of Albany and upstate New York to upcoming future climate change and global warming. I hope that we will see also an impact on the economy of the city. So as you know, there is a correlation between green spaces and cost of cost of real estate. Also our students actually defended their masters on linkages which exists between green spaces and the health of people. So typically people who live in areas where there are green spaces, they are healthier than people who live in just an urban environment. By this reason, they could go outside, they can do exercise. And that makes the kind of maintenance of your own health much easier. So there are multiple benefits from having good urban forests in our area.
We've been speaking about the benefits of the urban forests, what are some of the biggest threats to urban forests?
In some cases, that's land development. Very often developers when they get a piece of land covered with trees, the first thing they do, they cut the trees, then they build the houses. And then people have to grow trees around those houses, after all the trees were cut. Another threat of course, is the same climate change because as our research demonstrated, not all trees will adapt well to what is coming. So increased heat in the city environment will cause some species to basically to disappear. We have a kind of experiment running for more than 12 years now in the preserve, not far from the upstate campus of SUNY Albany. What we found there is that spruce species actually respond to heat quite differently. White Spruce actually is pretty much on its way out from the region, it's dying out. Red spruce, on the other hand, demonstrate much better resilience and much better response to climate warming. I think actually because of that, because we know what's going on with certain species, SUNY Albany can contribute important kind of component to the development of urban forests in upstate New York because we know which trees will survive in the future.
