Project Overview

As the world’s first old growth, urban research forest the Thain Family Forest (TFF) at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) provides an invaluable reference for regional forest ecosystem monitoring with upgraded data to address emerging needs. Climate change mitigation and adaptation require healthy forests, especially in cities. However, urban forest monitoring lacks an old-growth reference for soil carbon (C). Furthermore, urban soils may pose unique risks with increasingly heavy rainfall, which can remobilize accumulated heavy metals. This project upgrades the TFF monitoring program to better understand current threats, historical trends and future directions of the urban forested landscape in the Northeast.

Objectives

(1) follow an international standard for soil C monitoring aligned with the decades-old TFF Continuous Forest Inventory (CFI) program (2) deploy the first local weather station focused on hydrology (3) restart the first regional study of forest urbanization by remeasuring soil health, including heavy metal concentrations (4) implement our project in a sustainable, inclusive and equitable way by supporting the NYBG internship program and coordinating with a regional urban forest advocacy group.

Dataset Availability

Tags

Status - Active

Start date: 2024-05-20

Anticipated end date: 2025-08-01

Study Area

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