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Climate Fact Of The Day – Trees do 8 times better in the New York City Urban Heat Island
The Earth Institute Columbia University – City streets can be mean, but somewhere near Brooklyn, a tree grows far better than its country cousins, due to chronically elevated city heat levels, says a new study. The study, just published in the journal Tree Physiology, shows that common native red oak seedlings grow as much as eight times faster in New York’s Central Park than in more rural, cooler settings in the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains. Red oaks and their close relatives dominate areas ranging from northern Virginia to southern New England, so the study may have implications for changing climate and forest composition over a wide region.
The “urban heat island” is a well-known phenomenon that makes large cities hotter than surrounding countryside; it is the result of solar energy being absorbed by pavement, buildings and other infrastructure, then radiated back into the air. With a warming climate, it is generally viewed as a threat to public health that needs mitigating. On the flip side, “Some organisms may thrive on urban conditions,” said tree physiologist Kevin Griffin of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who oversaw the study. Griffin said that the city’s hot summer nights, while a misery for humans, are a boon to trees, allowing them to perform more of the chemical reactions needed for photosynthesis when the sun comes back up. Read Article
Tags: climate, nature universe
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