The Future of the Urban Forest: Performance of Urban Trees under Climate Change

Peter Ibsen, UC Riverside

12:00 PM to 12:30 PM — Room 102

Through the research efforts of the Jenerette Lab at UCR and the collaboration of Citizen Science through Earthwatch, Peter is examining traits in specific species of trees found across the Southern California coastal to desert climate gradient. This novel study will explain, through the changes in tree function, how the performance of urban trees may shift along with climate change. Riverside Citizen Scientists have been collecting data to help with this research.

Peter is now earning his PhD in Botany and Plant Science at UC, Riverside with a focus on functional urban ecology. While working in the lab of Dr. Darrel Jenerette, Peter is focused on the Los Angeles Megacity as a research field site, while incorporating the work of citizen science. He comes from a background in urban horticulture. After finishing a BA in sociology at University of San Francisco, he began working as a nursery buyer, urban farmer, and landscape designer in California’s Bay Area. Peter re-entered academic plant science first through a sustainable ecology and environmental monitoring program at City College of San Francisco. Through that program he completed research internships with the EcoCenter at Heron’s Head Park developing a vegetation monitoring program, and with the National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring department, preparing a plant community monitoring protocol in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore. He followed that work with a summer of research at University of Arizona’s Biosphere 2, examining heat tolerance in poplar trees. In addition to his research, Peter has mentored UCR undergraduates and spoken on the relationship of citizen science and academic research at the 2015 American Geophysical Union meeting. Project website: www.inaturalist.org/projects/focal-trees-project