Live fast, die young: Accelerated growth, mortality, and turnover in street trees

Municipalities are turning to greening initiatives like tree planting to tackle urban sustainability and combat the environmental impacts of expansive urbanization. This study uncovered some surprising findings about urban street trees. It turns out they have crazy-fast growth, nearly 4 times quicker than their rural forest counterparts. However, city trees also face dramatically higher mortality rates, more than double what’s seen in the countryside. As a result, despite all those planting efforts, the net carbon storage in urban street trees is actually declining over time. The authors conclude that if we really want these urban greening initiatives to be an effective climate solution, we’ll need to pair all that tree-planting with some strategic maintenance efforts.