Covers instagram highlight icons9/12/2023 The methods and results in i-Tree are intended to facilitate urban planning, scenario assessment and prioritization for urban forest management, and advocacy. ![]() How can city planners remain resilient and adapt to heat-related mortality? In cooler cities, such as Minneapolis, trees can reduce mortality significantly on extremely hot days and therefore help mitigate impacts during heat wave conditions. For example, in Phoenix, mortality was reduced up to 22%. Hot and dry cities benefit more in the summer season overall. This wide variation across cities is due to differences in demographics, land cover, and local climatic conditions. Heat-related mortality decreased significantly, from approximately 50 fewer deaths in Salt Lake City to about 3,800 fewer deaths in New York City. cities across different climatic regions and examined impacts throughout the season and on extremely hot days. To explore how effective trees might be in different locations, we also implemented a 10% increase in tree coverage scenario in 10 U.S. The highest mortality reduction was seen not directly in downtown Baltimore but instead in the outskirts where the majority of people aged 65 or older live. Reductions in air temperature due to increased tree cover were greatest in downtown Baltimore where tree cover is relatively low and impervious cover is relatively high. We find that increasing tree cover by 10% reduces heat-related deaths by 83 to 247 people, and more than 50% of the reduced mortality is among people aged 65 or older. ![]() We demonstrate this method by looking at Baltimore City, Maryland. These decision support tools can be used to quantify and value the beneficial impacts of tree cover.įollowing a four-step process, we (1) quantify tree and impervious cover at the census block group level, (2) model the effect of changes in urban tree cover on air temperatures across the United States using i-Tree Cool Air (Yang et al., 2013), (3) apply health impact functions from epidemiological literature to relate changes in air temperature to human health, and (4) monetize changes in premature mortality using estimates from economic valuation literature. The suite of i-Tree tools delivers peer-reviewed tree benefits estimation science from the USDA Forest Service to users with access to free tools. This project provides the foundation for expanding the suite of benefits in i-Tree to include a temperature module. ![]() Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service, the State University of New York (SUNY), and Davey-Tree, RTI International developed a new method for modeling the impacts of tree cover on air temperatures and heat-related mortality and applied it to selected cities across the United States.
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