Urban Forests

As a post-doc in Dr. Sarah Hobbie's lab, I collaborated with researchers at the University of Minnesota and the U.S. Forest Service, as well as with local and regional non-profits, agencies, practitioners, and community members, to understand how social-ecological factors relate to patterns of urban forest structure and biodiversity. Our overarching goal is to provide relevant research and information to help build more resilient and equitable urban forests as our communities are increasingly threatened by multiple environmental changes such as pest and pathogen outbreaks and more extreme weather events. This work is part of the NSF-funded Minneapolis-St. Paul Long-Term Ecological Research program.

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Associated Products:

• Our peer-reviewed manuscript of this research has been accepted at Ecological Applications.

• The spatially-explicit tree inventory database we developed as part of our manuscript is publicly available here. 

• To encourage standardization across tree inventories, we developed a template for urban tree inventory data collection. Download here. 

• We produced a K-12 classroom activity titled Trees and the city in partnership with Data Nuggets

• We provided each municipality or organization that contributed data to our tree inventory database with an individualized data report summarizing their tree canopy biodiversity and associated climate resilience in relation to the broader MSP metropolitan area.

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I am exploring new research projects to continue this work as a visiting research scholar at the University of Minnesota. Please reach out to discuss possible collaborations.