Urban trees and greenspace in a changing climate

Home research Urban trees and greenspace in a changing climate

This project aims to increase understanding of the contribution that trees make to urban environments.

Trees provide a wide range of benefits to urban society (for a useful summary see Delivery of Ecosystem Services by Urban Forests). The mechanisms by which many of these benefits are delivered are not fully understood, and the steps required to optimise delivery are poorly defined beyond increasing tree cover.

Research objectives

The Resilience of urban trees to a changing climate programme aimed to investigate drought stress tolerance of a range of trees commonly planted in Great Britain as street trees.
The Role of urban trees and greenspaces in urban climate regulation programme has worked extensively to understand the role of greenspaces in cooling the urban realm, and is now considering the effects of street trees on local air temperatures and thermal comfort of residents.
The Quantification and valuation of ecosystem service provision of urban trees programme works to quantify and value a range of benefits provided by urban trees using tools such as i-Tree Eco and Treezilla

Links to these projects are provided in the menu on the left hand side of this page.

Contact

Kieron Doick

Forestry Commission policy

This work addresses the policy areas of:

Forests and climate change
Sustainable forest management

Themes

Climate change, Land reclamation

Research Status

current

Research Groups

Urban forests

Funding & partners

Forestry Commission Climate Change and Trees in the Built Environment programme