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Contributed Talk

Session: : Urban Ecosystems 7

COS 226-1 - A tale of five of cities: Quantifying the benefitscape and riskscape of the urban canopy under climate change.

Wednesday, August 9, 2023
3:30 PM – 3:45 PM PDT
Location: E146
Abstract: Cities, and the nature within them, are experiencing the intensifying impacts of climate change. Both people and ecosystems in cities are subjected to increasingly extreme weather events and pest outbreaks, putting the quality of life in cities at risk. To counter this, many cities have ambitious tree planting goals to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. However, such strategies rarely take into account the functional diversity of the urban canopy or matching tree traits to local climate hazards, which are essential to diffuse risk.



We develop a methodology to inform the strategic selection of species and plantation sites in cities that meet both social and climate tree planting goals. We test and assess the impact of these strategies on the overall canopy resilience (riskscape) and ecosystem service (ES) provision (benefitscape) across cities in Canada. Specifically, using spatial modeling and forecasting, we compare current business-as-usual (BAU) tree planting strategies with our a functional driversity strategy with varying degrees of spatial matching to climate hazards and social criteria. We demonstrate the utility of our approach through a tale of five cities.



Tale 1: Quebec city’s canopy has been severely impacted by the emerald ash borer. We compare two spatially non-targeted replanting strategies to a BAU scenario for their ability to restore ecosystem services while improving the diversity of the canopy. Results suggest that functional-diversity driven planting strategies increase ecosystem service provision over business-as-usual (BAU) planting for some, but not all services. Tale 2: In Montreal, we apply our methodology to identify plantable spaces in the city and prioritize species selection based on local functional diversity and tolerance to local site specific climate hazards (vulnerability to flooding, extreme heat, heavy rains, storms). Results from this study suggest that adopting spatially-explicit trait matching planting strategies, can dramatically increase the overall functional diversity and tolerance of the canopy to climate hazards, but results in lower ES provision compared to BAU scenarios, pointing to a potential trade-off between high-ES provisioning species and climate extreme tolerance. Tales 3-5: Finally, we adapt our method to 3 additional cities across Canada to determine if similar trade-offs exist in other social and climatic contexts. Specifically, we assess how following functional diversity-driven planting strategies forecasted to 2050 can mitigate the degree of vulnerability of the canopy to climate change, and quantify the associated amount of ecosystem services at risk to climate change.

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