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THROWING SHADE: MODEL MAPS NYC STREET TREES’ COOLING BENEFITS

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THROWING SHADE: MODEL MAPS NYC STREET TREES’ COOLING BENEFITS


BY JAMES DEAN, CORNELL CHRONICLE

August 14, 2023
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Cornell researchers’ “leaf-level” visualization of every tree in New York City –
and how much shade each provides – could inform new strategies for mitigating
extreme heat there, and in other cities coping with record-breaking
temperatures.

Tree Folio NYC creates a “digital twin” of New York’s urban canopy. The
high-resolution, 3D model not only details trees’ location, type and size, but
simulates how local conditions such as street orientation, street width and
building height influence their shading benefits.

For decades, cities have planted trees in uniform rows along streets. But
improved understanding of how tree placement impacts shading could help planners
plant and maintain trees more strategically to maximize climate benefits and
distribute them equitably, said Alex Kobald, project lead and associate director
of the Design Across Scales Lab in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning
(AAP).

“We’re trying to better understand the relationship between a tree and its local
environment,” Kobald said, “and how that local environment impacts the benefits
a tree can provide.”

The lab led by J. Meejin Yoon, B.Arch. ’95, the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of
AAP, investigates spatial, social, and environmental challenges at the
intersection of the built environment, ecology, and technology. Tree Folio, NYC
explores the street tree and urban canopy as a form of city infrastructure. The
project was developed with students and funding from the Design Across Scales
Lab at AAP and the Urban Tech Hub, part of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute
at Cornell Tech. Kobald has shared early versions with municipal agencies and
policy advocates, and said the open-source tool could be scaled to other cities
using publicly available data.

The research team launched the web application as many cities are investing in
tree cover to reduce vulnerability to warming – July was the hottest month on
record globally – and mitigate so-called heat island effects, when building
materials absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat. The federal Inflation Reduction Act
includes $1.5 billion to improve climate resilience through such initiatives.

“Extreme heat is one of the most acute and lethal risks of climate change,
especially for cities, and we have deployable solutions now,” Kobald said. “In
cities around the world, urban trees are vital infrastructure for confronting
extreme heat events exacerbated by climate change.”

The model is constructed from New York City’s most recent 2021 3D aerial scan of
the five boroughs using lidar sensing, short for light detection and ranging.
The researchers developed a method to extract the urban forest from the
high-resolution survey of the built environment, creating an interactive map of
trees viewable from any angle, each a cluster of green data points that resemble
leaves.

The lidar scan is linked to the city’s 2015 tree census, which counted more than
666,000 public, curbside trees greening more than 131,000 blocks. Clicking on
any tree reveals its address, species, health status, height, canopy radius and
trunk diameter, and a planned folio tool would allow comparisons with like trees
– honey locusts, say, or pin oaks – in the same ZIP code. Most importantly, Tree
Folio, NYC enables users to simulate the shade any street tree produces over an
entire year, computing the extent to which it shades public ground or building
facades, or lives entirely in shadow itself – thus adding no net cooling
benefit.

Urban canopy traditionally is measured as a percentage of an area covered by
trees – about 22% of New York overall, a total that advocates propose growing to
30% by 2035. But Kobald said Tree Folio, NYC shows that the quality of that
coverage is highly dependent on each individual tree’s local context.

The difference can be seen in a comparison of three neighborhoods that share
similar physical characteristics – building heights, street widths and number of
trees – but differ in street orientations, socioeconomic status and heat
vulnerability indexes.

Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Pelham Gardens in the Bronx and Ozone Park in Queens,
Kobald said, have similar numbers of trees but vary drastically in quality and
impact. Because trees are larger and more evenly distributed in Park Slope and
Pelham Gardens, those neighborhoods see more beneficial shading on streets and
buildings. Ozone Park also is significantly more exposed on east-west streets
where summer afternoon heat is most intense, increasing its vulnerability.

“It’s not just that there are fewer trees in Ozone Park, but that the trees that
are there aren’t in the right places,” Kobald said.

To address such discrepancies, he said, cities might invest in the same number
of tree plantings but concentrate them where they can make the biggest
difference.

“Cities should be planting green belts rather than green blankets,” he said.

Tree Folio, NYC combines AAP’s spatial understanding of urban data and the
environment producing it, Kobald said, and the Urban Tech Hub’s experience
working with complex data on a very large scale – some 600 gigabytes involving
150 billion points extracted from 1,800 lidar files.

“It’s been a fantastic collaboration,” he said. Yoon concurred and shared how
critical the collaboration was to showcasing how open source data sets can be
used, analyzed, and built upon to provide new tools for more equitable and
impactful climate mitigation strategies. 

The project team also includes research assistants Joe Ferdinando, M.Arch. ’22,
M.Eng. ’23; Sarang Pramode, M.S. ’23; Jiahao Dong, M.S. ’23; and graduate
student Guangwei Jiang; and advisers Anthony Townsend, urbanist in residence at
the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, and Yoon.

Architecture & Design
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MEDIA CONTACT

JEFF TYSON

jeff.tyson@cornell.edu
(607) 793-5769


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