![]() Using data from the US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Inventory and Analysis program-which monitors tree size, growth, and land use across the country-Hutyra’s team looked at more than 48,000 forest plots in the Northeast United States. In one of the most detailed looks at temperate forest edges to date, Hutyra and her research team, including collaborators at the Harvard Forest, examined the growth rates of edge trees compared to the rest of the forest. Their results can challenge current ideas about conservation and the value of urban forests as more than places for recreation. In two recent research papers, Hutyra’s team found edge trees grow faster than their country cousins deep in the forest, and that soil in urban areas can hoard more carbon dioxide than previously thought. Soils and trees in temperate forest edges in the Northeast United States are acting differently than those farther away from people. ![]() It has long been assumed that these forest edges release and store carbon at similar rates as forest interiors, but Hutyra and researchers in her lab at BU have discovered this isn’t true. A forest edge in Newton, Mass., where researchers consistently measured and monitored the soil to determine how much carbon is being released. These alterations to forests create more areas called forest edges-literally, the trees at the outermost edge of a forest. Forests get cut into smaller parcels, as chunks are taken down to make space for roads, buildings, agriculture, and solar farms-one of the biggest drivers of forest loss in Massachusetts. “We think about forests as big landscapes, but really they are chopped up into all these little segments because of the human world,” says Hutyra, a BU College of Arts & Sciences professor of earth and environment. These forests are doing an incredible service to our planet.”įor more than a decade, Hutyra has been investigating what happens to the planet’s “lungs” when large forests are cut down into smaller patches, a process researchers call forest fragmentation. ![]() “We’re not feeling the full effects of climate change because of the terrestrial climate sink. “That’s CO2 that’s not in the atmosphere,” says Boston University biogeochemist and ecologist Lucy Hutyra. Photo by Jackie Ricciardiįorests actually store more carbon dioxide than they release, which is great news for us: about 30 percent of carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are taken in by forests, an effect called the terrestrial carbon sink. Lucy Hutyra, a CAS professor of earth and environment. ![]()
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