Global patterns of urban tree ecophysiology and climate resilience
Fri, Dec 15
|San Francisco
Introducing the Urban Tree Ecophysiology Network (UTEN)


Time & Location
Dec 15, 2023, 2:40 PM – 2:50 PM
San Francisco, 747 Howard St, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA
About the event
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 thresholds for damage or mortality of street trees extending beyond a single city.
To address these gaps, we have established the Urban Tree Ecophysiology Network (UTEN), a collaborative global platform of researchers, stakeholders, and municipal governments. UTEN aims to aggregate information on the feedback between urban trees and their environment across diverse climate regions. Through coordinated trait campaigns across 10 target cities we measured physiological traits to estimate tree function and health. Target cities are distributed across North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia and are categorized by climate (warm+wet, warm+dry, and temperate). We surveyed dry-season leaf water status and functional traits (e.g., leaf turgor loss point) and tree morphology, size, and age for six common species per city. These data will be paired with continuously monitored community transpiration, and growth using IoT technology. The synthesis of these data will address common questions related to tree health in the face of a changing climate. As many urban forests are managed and irrigated, our network also has the potential to realize the capacity of urban forests to collectively serve as a “global common garden” for integrative models that can be scaled to accommodate diverse species and wide abiotic variation.
Plain-language Summary Vegetation in cities increases property values, stores excess rainwater, provides shade and cooling through evapotranspiration, and filters particulate pollutants from the air. Because plants in urban environments are typically managed in conditions to which they are not adapted, it is difficult to predict their response to changes in management practices or perform under extreme heat waves and droughts associated with climate change. With the aim of improving management, sustainability, and resilience of urban forests, we established a global Urban Tree Ecophysiology Network (UTEN). UTEN operates as a platform for data sharing and collaboration between cities around the world. During the dry season for ten cities, members of UTEN surveyed proxies for the health and function of trees across and present generalizable findings. These data will be paired with continuous monitoring of tree water use and growth. Ultimately these data will tell us whether urban trees are stressed under current management practices (e.g., irrigation) and inform strategies to improve management in the future.
Authors Grace P John, University of Florida
Presenting Author Maria Paula Cuervo, University of Florida
https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm23/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/1450422
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