[CANUFNET] Tree species selection for CC, RE: CANUFNET Digest, Vol 144, Issue 4

Wed Feb 15 16:19:43 EST 2017

Greetings Amber and CANUFNET colleagues:

Thanks for opening this interesting theme for discussion. And thanks to Alex for mentioning Maliheh Rostami's thesis. The database she built to support her thesis is available from me. As many colleagues know, I’ve been working on the theme of forests and climate change for almost three decades, but of course most of my work has been scholarship-oriented rather than direct practical initiatives to get any forests ready for a changing climate. That said, we did think a bit about climate change when we put together the Point Pleasant Park Comprehensive Plan in 2008 and the HRM Urban Forest Master Plan in 2012/13. I invite you to examine these plans - available online - to see our climate-change content.

May I also draw your attention to a couple of recent papers by my former PhD student Camilo who addressed the theme of urban forests and climate change. Here are the citations:

Ordóñez, C. and P.N. Duinker.  2015. Climate change vulnerability assessment for urban forests in three Canadian cities.  Climatic Change 131:531-543.  doi:10.1007/s10584-015-1394-2 

Ordóñez, C. and P.N. Duinker.  2014. Assessing the vulnerability of urban forests to climate change.  Environmental Reviews 22(3)311-321. doi:10.1139

I would like to address each of the topics in your recommendations list. First, I don’t think it is wise to have a simple “Continentally Native” category for tree species. It is extremely unlikely that tree species of western North America would find their way to the east and, as you put it, “potentially expand into our area” during climatic change. As my former student Sophie reported (in this paper: Nitoslawski, S.A., and P.N. Duinker.  2016.  Managing tree diversity: a comparison of suburban development in two Canadian cities.  Forests 7(6):119.  doi:10.3390/f7060119), you have just over eighty indigenous tree species in the London area, so your native-species palette is about as good as it gets in Canada. For you in London, it would seem to me to be more sensible to focus on native-species gene material that has evolved under the new expected climate (from the south) rather than search for new species not now resident in the Carolinian forest.

Another thing about species from western North America versus species from Europe. As far as I know there is only one beech species in North America. It is in your neighbourhood in southern Ontario, and it is succombing throughout its range to the beech bark disease. The responsible scale insect is alleged to have come to North America (Halifax, actually) in the late nineteenth century on European beech stock from the UK. European beech seems resistant, but American beech almost appears doomed. In Nova Scotia, it is rare to find an uninfected American beech tree, and many young stands of beech are heavily damaged (old infected trees usually die fairly quickly). Until scientists develop resistant varieties of American beech, it seems foolish to plant it in our cities.

The point of mentioning this is that, if you took the approach of avoiding all tree species not from North America, you would be denying urban foresters of the prospect of having European beeches in their cities. I would favour admitting European beech to the species palette in eastern North America so that the genus Fagus can be represented, and I would resist admitting western North American species to our palettes for eastern North America. There may be other tree species for which this same argument might be made.

Another proposal in your message was to select a citywide climate scenario for planning purposes. I have been working on the concept of scenario analysis for planning and policy also for about three decades, and I can say with confidence that the notion of picking one scenario for citywide application is not a favourable approach. The main reason is because the long-term scenarios of climate change are not predictions in the sense that we have any idea of the relative likelihoods of any one of them unfolding in reality. It is, of course, a good idea to track actual climate variables in the context of IPCC scenarios, but just because one may find that immediate changes (i.e., within, say, a decade) in climatic variables are tracking a specific IPCC scenario does NOT mean that society is locked into that scenario for the long haul. Early in the IPCC’s work, the reports gave qualitative probability estimates for the scenarios; now they don’t because IPCC has realized how misleading these can be.

Scenario experts advise that the best thing to do is to plan for the contingencies that might be associated with multiple long-term scenarios. Thus, we should develop plans and policies for urban forests that make them as resilient as they can be regardless which climate scenario actually becomes the truth. As a pointer in doing scenario analysis, it is worth building scenarios at the extremes of what we think may be possible, but not then picking a middling scenario and imagining it to be the most probable.

On the matter of climate-change scenarios and scenario planning in general, I encourage you to make contact with Irena Creed at Western University. She is London’s top scholar on scenario analysis and she is currently leading a project, in which I’m involved, looking at alternative futures for Canada’s boreal forests to 2050. Also, perhaps you know that my team implemented an urban-forest vulnerability assessment workshop in London in June 2013 - we can send you the report, and digital copies of any of our other publications on urban forests and climate change, if that would be helpful.

Best wishes, Peter Duinker

Peter N. Duinker, PhD, P.Ag.
Professor
School for Resource and Environmental Studies
Faculty of Management
Dalhousie University
6100 University Ave.
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada 
B3H 4R2
Phone: 902-494-7100
Cell: 902-229-5141
Fax: 902-494-3728
Email: peter.duinker at dal.ca
http://www.dal.ca/faculty/management/sres/faculty-staff/our-faculty/peter-duinker.html

-----Original Message-----
From: CANUFNET [mailto:canufnet-bounces at list.web.net] On Behalf Of MacDonald, Alex via CANUFNET
Sent: February 15, 2017 2:44 PM
To: canufnet at list.web.net; canufnet-request at list.web.net
Subject: [CANUFNET] Tree species selection for CC, RE: CANUFNET Digest, Vol 144, Issue 4

Hi Amber,

Maliheh Rostami, a former graduate student at Dalhousie University, developed a tree species selection model different climate envelopes in 2011 that appears as an appendix to the Halifax Regional Municipality's 2013 Urban Forest Master Plan (UFMP). You can access the full thesis at http://dalspace.library.dal.ca/handle/10222/14211. A total of 57 native/continentally native tree species were examined, of which 16 were considered to be suitable for Halifax's urban landscapes and regional climate in 2100, based on projected climate ranges for each species from McKenney et al 2007. 

Halifax's UFMP also includes Operational Principles related building resilience to climate change, trees as part of green infrastructure, invasive species impacts and naturalness/ecological integrity. The full plan is available here - http://www.halifax.ca/property/UFMP/documents/SecondEditionHRMUFMP.pdf. The city's UFMP website includes resources that may also be of interest, and you can contact ufmp at halifax.ca for additional information.

Cheers,
Alex 

ALEX MACDONALD, MSC
CLIMATE CHANGE SPECIALIST 
ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT
PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT

HΛLIFΛX
T. 902.490.4553
F. 902.490.4346
halifax.ca 

-----Original Message-----
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Sent: February-15-17 1:00 PM
To: canufnet at list.web.net
Subject: CANUFNET Digest, Vol 144, Issue 4

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Climate change adaptation strategies
      (Geri Poisson via CANUFNET)

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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2017 14:12:23 +0000
From: Geri Poisson via CANUFNET <canufnet at list.web.net>
To: 'Amber Cantell' <amber at reforestlondon.ca>, 'Canadian Urban Forest
	Network' <canufnet at list.web.net>
Subject: Re: [CANUFNET] Climate change adaptation strategies
Message-ID: <31f00c2fafac46f796105aaaff67fab7 at MB004.v083.os33.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Amber, You may already be aware of this publication but it looks like a good resource and the whole book is free: ?Cities adapt to extreme heat - Celebrating local leadership  http://iclr.org/citiesadaptheat.html

Geri Poisson, B.A. (Hon) / ISA Certified Arborist, CAN-CISEC Terrestrial Ecologist Beacon Environmental
126 Kimberley Avenue, Bracebridge, ON P1L 1Z9
T)  705.645.1050 x22  F) 705.645.6639
www.beaconenviro.com<http://www.beaconenviro.com/>

From: CANUFNET [mailto:canufnet-bounces at list.web.net] On Behalf Of Amber Cantell via CANUFNET
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2017 8:52 AM
To: canufnet at list.web.net
Subject: [CANUFNET] Climate change adaptation strategies

Good afternoon everyone,

I am with the Trees & Forests Advisory Committee here in London, Ontario, and our committee is currently exploring ways the City's urban forestry program could begin preparing for climate change. Projections for our area for 2050 indicate upwards of 5 degrees in warming; by the end of the century, it could be as high as 14 (based on some of the newest studies). Consequently, we're feeling motivated to get to work (and planting) while we still have some time.

I was curious to know what other municipalities, specifically, are doing to plan for climate change within their urban forestry program.

It seems that so far, there is widespread acknowledgement of the massive impacts climate change is going to have on trees and forests, but few concrete steps being taken to prepare for it. It also seems that most of us (and other organizations in the national and provincial park systems, etc.) are at the point where we're all sort of holding our breath with regards to assisted migration - I've read an enormous number of articles about organizations preparing for and discussing the idea, but no one seems to want to be the first to undertake it.... at least not in any official sense beyond the "research" phase. It was interesting to hear about Andrew Almas' study that showed that most municipalities are effectively already unintentionally doing assisted migration (which makes sense in light of how incredibly easy it is to buy plants from all sorts of places around the world and the lack of regulation there), but, given the risks it could involve, it'd be nice to see something being don  e in a purposeful and thoughtful fashion. I have to admit to being personally curious about what the point is where we "pull the trigger" - I imagine many of you have been having similar thoughts.

In the meantime, our team has been working on coming up with a set of recommendations for London. So far, we have:

- Move from a blanket "Non-Native" vs. "Native" classification system to one where instead of just using "Native", we would have "Native" (for plants native to our area pre-European settlement) and "Continentally Native" (for species not currently native to London, but native to continental North America, and therefore may potentially expand into our area), and then using "Non-Native" for anything from elsewhere on the planet. This approach would recognizing that it is natural for species ranges to move north or south across the continent in response to climate, but still allow us to do our best to exclude invasive species from other continents (by far the bulk of the "invasive" species we deal with).

- Defining principles for assisted migration here in London and at what stage we would consider what option (bringing up southern-adapted seed of already native species vs. introducing new species, etc.)

- Selecting a citywide "climate planning scenario" to create consistency between different departments in terms of what climate we are planning for. Ultimately, the choice for what climate to plan for is a political one (as it's based on what we think people will manage to accomplish in terms of reducing emissions), but it is one that needs to be made, as it should particularly bearing on forestry and stormwater infrastructure planning.

We've seen some ad hoc efforts to plan based on a specific scenario (for example, one stormwater study in 2009 appears to have planned for a scenario where emissions were assumed to have increased between 2000 and 2009 but then cease in 2009), but nothing citywide as of yet.

As a part of this, we would also likely be recommending that our city set a schedule for checking on how projections are comparing with the IPCC updates, and have capacity to move to a worse or better scenario as the decades progress, based on how successful we are - or aren't - in reducing emissions.

- Creating a "Climate Change Sister City" network to link communities with "analogous climates" to share resources and suppliers - for example, linking London to a city in the U.S. that has, today, the climate we might be expecting for 2050.

By any chance are there any communities out there already undertaking any of these ideas, or have suggestions for other ideas we may wish to consider for London?

Many thanks!
Amber

--

Amber Cantell

Director of Programs, ReForest London

519-936-9548 x224

reforestlondon.ca<http://www.reforestlondon.ca>

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