Grant: Advancing Climate Change Science in Canada

Urban forests (UF) are associated with important ecosystem services, such as reduced heat and improved air quality, which benefit both environmental and human health. These benefits will become even more important with climate change (CC), yet it is unclear how the UF will be impacted by CC, how that will affect human health, and how the UF can be adapted to face CC and better support ecosystem services. This includes removing carbon, which Canada has an obligation to report on. Current estimates of the UF carbon in Canada use rates based on empirical observations made in United States and/or in natural forests. This has been identified as an important source of uncertainty that needs to be addressed to forecast future UF density and composition, and to investigate the hypothesis that the effects of CC on people may be greater than previously thought if trees are also themselves affected negatively. Features such as tree size and crown shape that influence resilience to CC and ecosystem services in UF are also different than in natural forests. Yet incomplete inventories of urban trees and a paucity of data on canopies means that relevant data for modeling and prediction of service production is scarce. Our goal is to better characterize UF with richer data, and to identify best practices for developing resilient UFs that will support ecosystem services now and in the future.