Where Forests Work Harder
CityLab.com (December 19, 2016)
A new study shows that trees in the Boston region grow faster and store more carbon as biomass the closer they are to developed areas.
The woods at the Mass Audubon Habitat Wildlife Sanctuary in Belmont, Massachusetts—a well-heeled suburb six miles from downtown Boston—are pleasant but commonplace, the kind of place that New Englanders go to walk their dogs or get a taste of nature. But to Andrew Reinmann, a biologist at Boston University, this is also a critical ecosystem to study.
That’s because as urban development spreads, patchy woods like this are increasingly the norm. “More and more of the landscape is becoming fragmented,” Reinmann says, as we swish through a thick mat of fall leaves. Forests are important asset in fighting climate change, absorbing an estimated 30 percent of the carbon dioxide we emit from burning fossil fuels. But those estimates come from big forests, says Reinmann, and we know relatively little about how patchy forests function, and whether they provide the same services that large forests do.
A study published on Monday in PNAS by Reinmann and BU environmental scientist Lucy Hutyra shows that forest fragments in New England behave differently than intact forests in surprising ways: they may pull significantly more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than predicted.