EGU25-10826, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-10826
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Tree monitoring as tool in urban transformation towards Blue-Green infrastructure
Katrin Fröhlich1, Jan Friesen2, Snigdha Dev Roy2, Susanne Benz3, Tamalika Chakraborty4, Jan Totzki4, and Somidh Saha1
Katrin Fröhlich et al.
  • 1ITAS, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany (katrin.froehlich@kit.edu)
  • 2Department of Systemic Environmental Biotechnology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany
  • 3IPF, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
  • 4IFGG, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

As climate change continues, heatwaves and droughts are becoming more frequent and prolonged, challenging urban systems. Urban systems are built by and home to people, but they are also home to many other forms of life such as plants and animals. They include buildings and roads, but also green spaces and water management. To make urban areas resilient and livable for all in the future, we need new approaches and ideas to tackle the consequences of climate extremes such as flooding and overheating. Green spaces in particular have the potential to partially mitigate climate extremes in cities; trees cool sealed infrastructure in the summer. As part of the Urban Transformation - Towards Blue-Green Infrastructure as well as the Cool Tree project, we are generating real field data from established urban green spaces. Focusing on urban trees, we assess their health, sap flow, radial growth, fine root growth, microhabitats, tree microclimate and cooling effect on their surroundings. The tree monitoring, we present was started in early 2025 and will cover at least one growing season. It involves 45 trees of three different tree species located on research and university campuses of two different German cities Leipzig (UFZ) and Karlsruhe (KIT). We are covering two different experimental approaches with one observing the tree cooling and growth of Platanus x hispanica in parklike conditions and the second covering the physiology and cooling capacity of building and street trees of the species Robinia pseudoacacia and Tilia cordata under different irrigation regimes. The application of these irrigation schemes will show the value of investing water for already established urban trees. Finally, and overall, we aim to determine whether irrigated urban trees are healthier and cool their surroundings more effectively than their non-irrigated neighbors.

How to cite: Fröhlich, K., Friesen, J., Dev Roy, S., Benz, S., Chakraborty, T., Totzki, J., and Saha, S.: Tree monitoring as tool in urban transformation towards Blue-Green infrastructure, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-10826, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-10826, 2025.