As global temperatures continue to rise, scientists around the world are searching for different ways to combat climate change. One area of research that’s become popular with both governments and private industry is forest carbon storage. 

Forest carbon storage relies on the ability of trees to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in their trunks, roots and soil as a possible combatant for climate change. 

Kendall McCoach, a graduate student at the University of Delaware, is researching how different urban conditions can affect a forest’s capacity to store carbon. 

To pursue this research question, McCoach is looking at vegetation survey data from trees and shrubs. The Ph.D. in Plant and Soil Sciences student also uses dendrochronology, where she studies the rings in trees and aged wood to track tree growth in response to variations in environmental conditions.

“You extract a pencil sized core from a tree. That allows you to look at these rings that the tree produces year after year,” McCoach said. “We get a record of the tree’s growth and its responses to environmental conditions throughout its life; we can kind of look back in time in that way.”

By studying the rings on the tree cores, scientists can tell a lot about the tree’s growth. Fluctuations in isotope ratios can show a tree’s response to change in climate. Compressions in the wood can show changes in wind speed over time. By looking at the series of ring widths in a tree, McCoach and her collaborators know how much or how little the tree has grown in every year. 

“With this data, we can correlate tree growth with environmental conditions like temperature, while also looking for tree growth differences between the forest edges versus the forest interior and between different cities,” McCoach said.

To paraphrase the old real estate saying — location matters. McCoach is interested in studying how tree growth and carbon sequestration can be affected by the urban forest’s location. A majority of the forests in the eastern U.S. are considered urban forests, so understanding how a forest responds to changing climatic and urban conditions is critical for better forest management and conservation. 

“To accurately model the ability of trees to store carbon, we need to take into account the forest edges,” said Tara Trammell, John Bartram Associate Professor of Urban Forestry and McCoach’s dissertation advisor. “Kendall is looking at forests that are more urbanized than what we’ve seen in forestry research, and those conditions might change the way our forests are actually storing carbon.”