Scientists at four leading Illinois research institutions, three in the Chicago region, are forming a new collaboration to study the effects of drought on urban trees and develop more effective drought response strategies nationwide through a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The project is being led by researchers at The Morton Arboretum in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago and the Illinois State Water Survey at the Prairie Research Institute.
“With the ongoing effects of climate change likely to make droughts and excessive heat events more common, healthy urban trees will play an increasingly important role in helping mitigate impacts on people’s lives,” said Christy Rollinson, the Arboretum’s forest ecologist and principal investigator on the project. “Trees provide a wealth of valuable ecological services, such as helping to keep cities cooler in the summer and absorbing groundwater to mitigate flooding.”
Those services make trees essential to a community’s capability to be resilient to the impacts of climate change. Negative climate change impacts include extreme weather events and flooding. According to M. Ross Alexander, assistant operation research analyst in Argonne’s Decision and Infrastructure Sciences division and scientist at large in the University of Chicago Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering, “A mature oak tree can pump through 50 gallons of water a day. That is water that will not go down the sewers. If a tree experiences hard droughts or multiple droughts, this functionality could be impaired.”
Read more at DOE/Argonne National Laboratory
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