Global patterns of urban tree ecophysiology and climate resilience

Plants provide critical services to  cities and are essential to human wellbeing in urban centers. However,  these services are threatened by projected increases in the frequency of  major climate events driven by anthropogenic climate change. As we  further our understanding of plant responses to global change, urban  ecosystems are often overlooked, and the conclusions drawn from natural  ecosystem and crops may not adequately represent urban vegetation. Urban  forests are fundamentally different from their natural counterparts  with respect to both their physical properties and dynamic ecosystem  processes. Because each city has a distinct flora, urban ecology is  vulnerable to the error propagation inherent to the broad application of  models derived from a single system. As a result, there is no consensus  on

 (1) the degree to which urban trees are persisting under stress at  present, 

(2) the cost of diminished ecosystem services under future  climates and management practices, 

or (3) the…