Urban forests may store more carbon than we thought, study finds
Barbara Moran | WBUR | February 16, 2022
https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/02/16/forest-fragments-northeast-us-climate-change-soil-respiration
Urban forests are little oases of nature, but they don’t get a lot of respect. The trees near the road get sprayed with salt and choked with soot; the boulders get tagged with graffiti, the trails through the woods are often littered with candy wrappers, soda bottles and plastic sacks of dog poo.
But despite the abuse, these small patches of forest may play an outsized role in combatting climate change, at least here in the Northeast. Two studies from Boston University find that trees around the edges of urban forests grow faster, and the soil gives off less carbon dioxide, than scientists expected. That means these scruffy edges are surprisingly good at pulling carbon dioxide out of the sky, and storing it underground.
The research suggests that fragmented urban forests, often dismissed as degraded remnants of their former selves, maybe be doing more for us city dwellers than we thought.
“The discussion about deforestation really focuses on what’s lost: the forest that’s lost, the habitat that’s lost. But we haven’t focused enough energy on what’s left behind,” said Lucy Hutyra, a professor of earth and environment at Boston University, and senior author on the two studies. “These forests, even these crummy little trash-filled urban forests with few trees, do a lot for society.”
Humans have chopped up most of the world’s forests into smallish “fragments,” bordered by roads, houses, factories and shopping malls. Although there’s no formal definition of a forest fragment, a good working definition may be a patch of woods where you can always hear the traffic, even if you can’t see it.
In the Northeastern United States, there’s a lot of urban woods like this: almost a quarter of the forest in the region sits 100 feet from a forest edge. And there are more fragments by the day: Massachusetts alone is losing about 5,000 acres of forest each year, according to Mass Audubon.
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