This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Maya Mangala-Munuma '25 first noticed it in her hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. When she walked from an affluent neighborhood to a more impoverished one, it wasn't just the houses and demographics that changed.
"You go from a really nice neighborhood with big, gorgeous, established trees, and then there's essentially a line where all of a sudden the trees don't look the same," Mangala-Munuma said. "I wanted to know why and if it's actually a phenomenon." She pursued the question for her undergraduate honors thesis at Cornell and is now first author of the resulting study, published in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening on Sept. 17. The study found a wide discrepancy in tree health along socioeconomic lines across 29 U.S. cities.
Using public data on representative city plots, Mangala-Munuma and her team found that, on average, 17% of trees were damaged in the whitest, most affluent neighborhoods, compared with nearly 60% in impoverished, racially diverse neighborhoods. The trees in minority neighborhoods also had 7% fewer leaves and were more likely to be dead. "This is a pretty striking finding, and it's not just one city—it's across all of them," said senior author and Mangala-Munuma's adviser Daniel Katz, assistant professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS).
"We know that trees do a great job of things like cooling, keeping people out of emergency rooms during heat waves. What this work implies is that people who are most vulnerable and most need these services are the least likely to receive them." Previous research using aerial images had documented that lower-income, minority neighborhoods have fewer trees than more affluent, whiter areas, but this is the first study to account for the health of those trees, which greatly affects the benefits they provide. "If you're just looking top-down at how many trees there are, you're going to miss the fact that these trees are also going to perform differently based on how damaged they are," said Mangala-Munuma, who majored in plant science in CALS.
"Not all trees are created equal." A healthy, mature tree provides cooling and shade, reduces air pollutants and catches stormwater. Researchers previously found that a lack of trees and the associated ecosystem services has resulted in tens of thousands of doctor's visits and hundreds of deaths. Damaged trees provide those benefits to a lesser extent or not at all and can be hazardous, with branches or even entire trees at risk of falling.
The research team used data from the Urban Forest Inventory & Analysis program, which provided on-the-ground assessments of 23,659 trees in 3,166 representative plots in the 29 cities. They paired that with demographic, economic and housing data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey.
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