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Estimating carbon storage in urban forests of New York City

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 22 December 2021

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Abstract

Forests play an important role in mitigating many of the negative effects of climate change. One of the ways trees mitigate impacts of climate change is by absorbing carbon dioxide and storing carbon in their wood, leaves, roots, and soil. Field assessments are used to quantify the carbon storage across different forested landscapes. The number of trees, their size, and total area inform estimates of how much carbon they store. Urban forested natural areas often have greater tree density compared to trees planted in designed cityscapes suggesting that natural area forests could be an important carbon stock for cities. We report a carbon budget for urban forested natural area using field-collected data across an entire city and model carbon stock and annual stock change in multiple forest pools. We find that natural area forests in New York City store a mean of 263.04 (95% CI 256.61, 270.40) Mg C ha-1 and we estimate that 1.86 Tg C (95% CI 1.60, 2.13 Tg C) is stored in the city’s forested natural areas. We provide an upper estimate that these forests sequester carbon at a mean rate of 7.42 (95% CI 7.13, 7.71) Mg C ha-1 y-1 totaling 0.044 Tg (95% CI 0.028, 0.055) of carbon annually, with the majority being stored in trees and soil. Urban forested natural areas store carbon at similar and in some cases higher rates compared to rural forests. Native oak-dominated forests with large mature trees store the most carbon. When compared to previous estimates of urban-canopy carbon storage, we find that trees in natural area forests in New York City account for the majority of carbon stored despite being a minority of the tree canopy. Our results show that urban forested natural areas play an important role in localized, natural climate solutions and should be at the center of urban greening policies looking to mitigate the climate footprint of cities.

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Acknowledgements

Funding to support this work was provided by the J.M. Kaplan fund. Thank you to staff at the Natural Areas Conservancy for feedback on this project including Bram Gunther, Helen Forgione and Sophie Plitt, Tessa O’Connell and Hunter Armstrong. Thank you to the field staff who helped to collect the data including Pitor Bartoszewski, Hannah Buck, Becca Carden, Kevin Corrigan, Jean Epiphian, Rebecca Gorney, Emory Griffin-Noyes, Catherine Molanphy, Jesse Moy, Devon Nemire-Pepe, Beth Nicholls, Nathan Payne, Hayden Ripple, Aaron Rogers, Stephanie Smith, Brian Tarpinian, Kimberly Thompson, Lillis Urban, Alec Wong, and to Mina Kim and Rachel Charrow for GIS and database support. Thanks to NYC Parks Natural Resources Group, and the NYC Urban Field Station for assistance and support throughout the assessment. Thank you to Rich Hallett and Chris Woodall for reviews of an earlier version of this work. Thank you to Jen Shin for making the illustrations.

Funding

This research was supported by the JM Kaplan Fund and a doctoral scholarship to C. Pregitzer from the Yale School of the Environment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Natural Areas Conservancy, 1234 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA

    Clara C. Pregitzer, Chloe Hanna & Sarah Charlop-Powers

  2. The Forest School, Yale School of the Environment, 195 Prospect St, New Haven, CT, 06517, USA

    Clara C. Pregitzer & Mark A. Bradford

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  1. Clara C. Pregitzer
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Correspondence to Clara C. Pregitzer.

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The original version of this article was revised: The article unfortunately contains two similar but different estimates. The correct estimate is 1.86 (95% CI, 1.60 and 2.13) rather than 1.84 C (95% CI, 1.58 and 2.10).

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Pregitzer, C.C., Hanna, C., Charlop-Powers, S. et al. Estimating carbon storage in urban forests of New York City. Urban Ecosyst 25, 617–631 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-021-01173-9

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