While destructive, hurricane Irma offers an opportunity to increase our knowledge about the response of trees and urban forests to hurricane disturbance. Understanding the resistance and resilience of urban forests to disturbance is essential to increasing our knowledge about how ecosystems will respond to changing climate regimes (e.g., increased storm frequency) into the future. The goal of this proposed research is to understand how windstorm-caused tree failure relates to urban forest structure, and socio-ecological context. We hypothesize that storm damage will be lower in areas with higher tree density and native tree cover, and higher in areas with indicators of lower socioeconomic status. The severity and scale of this storm will allow us to test these hypotheses across a range of urban forest conditions and increase our knowledge about disturbance impacts, an area which is poorly understood.
