Graceful, shade-giving, oxygen-producing and essential to global food production, trees are playing a critical role in the drama of the earth’s changing climate. At Cal State Northridge, a move is afoot to assess the role and impact of the thousands that have transformed the campus into something resembling Marvell’s “green thought in a green shade.”
Directed by associate professor of geography Helen Cox, nine geography undergrads are identifying, measuring and tagging every tree on the CSUN campus. That means more than 3,600 of varying species, some native, some ornamental and each with a different drought tolerance, shading capability and ability to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
At the heart of her investigation is a desire to know if the university can minimize its water usage—by choosing drought-tolerant trees—and sequester more C02.
Feeding the data into a software program developed by the U.S. Forest Service’s Center for Urban Forest Research, Cox is trying to determine how CSUN might reduce its overall greenhouse gas emissions by maximizing the uptake of carbon dioxide by trees.
Currently, CSUN’s carbon emissions data is sent to the California State University Chancellor’s Office, combined with data from other CSU campuses and integrated into a greenhouse gas inventory report for the California Climate Action Registry.
“I thought it would be interesting to find out Northridge’s numbers as a single campus,” said Cox, “and be able to calculate an individual carbon footprint for the university, so that we can look at ways internally to reduce it.”
Cox’s explorations led her to the 1989 “CSUN Plant Survey” by geography professor emeritus Robert Gohstand. “With all the changes to the campus since the 1994 Northridge earthquake,” said Cox, “I was certain the landscape would be significantly different.”
This Roxburgh fig tree provides fruit and shade to members of the campus community.
Her team of students used Gohstand’s tree atlas as a base map, then filled in the data for all of the new trees using botanical guides and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s national online plant database. Biogeographer, horticulturalist and assistant geography professor Doug Fischer, biology professor Jennifer Matos and Jim Hogue, herbarium curator, helped identify others.
About 20 percent of campus trees remain on the students’ identification “to-do” list for the survey, supported by CSUN Provost Harry Hellenbrand as a project of the campus’ core greening team, of which Cox is a member.
Among the notable trees tagged, said student team member Kevin Ulrich, are the huge Dawn Redwoods between two of the campus’ science buildings. Until a small forest was discovered in China in the 1940s, the Dawn Redwood was thought to be extinct, and still is considered critically endangered in the wild.
Student team members Brian Shimizu and Roger Motti never again will see trees as anonymous backdrops. “Walking down the street now, I find myself identifying trees,” said Shimizu.
The project, in fact, has had an effect on the students’ career paths. Ulrich is drawn to the restoration of native habitats, Shimizu is considering a master’s degree in environmental or sustainable geography, and Motti will pursue an interdisciplinary master’s degree at CSUN in sustainable development. He plans eventually to build sustainable urban communities focusing on food networks.
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