Project overview
New York City’s urban forests routinely cool surrounding neighborhoods by roughly 4 deg C during summer heat waves, yet those benefits vary by canopy structure, biomass, and water status. Our ECOSTRESS Urban Forest resilience project builds an observation system that couples thermal imagery with radar- and lidar-derived structure to understand where trees sustain cooling — and where water stress erodes that service.
Goals that guide the work
- G1: Quantify temperature reduction across NYC forest community types using ECOSTRESS diurnal land surface temperature retrievals.
- G2: Track how transpiration and canopy conductance respond to heat waves through sap-flow, soil moisture, and leaf water potential measurements.
- G3: Prioritize cooling investments by mapping neighborhoods where limited canopy vigor intersects with high heat vulnerability.
Observing system & analytics
Year 1 delivers a data system that mosaics ECOSTRESS repeats, PlanetScope vegetation classifications, and UAVSAR structural metrics to derive observational models of canopy cooling relative to adjacent urban fabric. SMAPVEX22 airborne acquisitions over Millbrook, NY provide rural reference forests so we can separate edge effects from true water stress signals. Backpack terrestrial laser scanning and detailed biometry in NYC parks tie canopy height, density, and stem distributions to thermal mitigation.
Process studies extend the analytics: sap-flow sensors, soil moisture probes, and micro-meteorological stations capture plant hydraulic strategies under extreme heat. Those measurements calibrate ECOSTRESS-derived latent heat flux estimates and reveal whether urban forests sustain evaporative cooling or shift toward stress shutdowns.
Open data commitments
Raster products (GeoTIFF) for temperature reduction, canopy structure, and landcover masks release by Year 2 Q1, while Level-3 water stress composites and in situ time series (CSV) follow in Year 3. Terrestrial laser scanning point clouds (LAS) document canopy architecture for reuse. All datasets ship with documentation and Jupyter notebooks through Zenodo and NASA TOPS-aligned repositories, with coordination for DAAC archival when appropriate.
Steiner Lab leadership
Nick Steiner leads the project, aligning ECOSTRESS analytics with NYC partners, coordinating UAVSAR acquisitions, and guiding the open-science workflow. The lab’s deliverables include reproducible notebooks for temperature reduction modeling, equity-focused summaries for city agencies, and integration of the resulting datasets into the Steiner Lab’s remote sensing curriculum and mentoring pipeline.