Botanic gardens have great untapped potential for climate change research.
To leverage this potential we are launching the Witness Tree Project, as part of our 10-year strategy. Every year we will collect and analyse data, and make information available on how the trees in our collection respond to and withstand changes in their environment, and evaluate how effectively they can filter out pollution, bridging the fields of climate change and urban forestry research.
We gratefully acknowledge funding from Dr Beate Schuler and the European Research Council (101020824).
Mission 1
Using Trees to evaluate the impact of green policies
Mission 2
Studying trees to inform outreach and risk mitigation
The Witness Trees
All our witness trees have different stories to tell. For some it is a story of threat in the face of environmental change and loss of their habitat. For others it is a story of local adaptation and resilience.
Data
To understand the stories of our witness trees we have to ask the right questions. Every summer our researchers observe critical functions in our trees which will tell us about their health, and ability to capture particulate matter pollution.
Our Witness Tree Archive
It is vital to keep a physical record of our witness trees every year as evidence of how the trees respond to climate change and capture pollution. We take a small branch sample with leaves and reproductive structures every year which is then pressed, dried and archived within Trinity College Dublin Herbarium. These herbarium specimens can be stored for hundreds of years as a physical reference for future generations of scientists to examine our findings and perhaps to ask new questions that we have not considered.