Graduate students across disciplines are eager for experiential training that enables them to address real-world environmental challenges. Simultaneously, communities across the world face numerous environmental challenges, including increased frequency of extreme heat in summer and poor air quality, and could benefit from the expertise and engagement of graduate students with the requisite skills and interests to address these challenges. In this paper we bring together lessons learned from three interdisciplinary graduate training programs focused on preparing graduate students to contribute to urban environmental solutions by working in partnerships with non-academic organizations. We discuss the multiple elements required for partnerships to be mutually beneficial, including using a T-shaped approach to training that incorporates both
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Abstract depth andbreadth while making strong efforts to broaden participation. We share lessons with the goal of enhancing graduate programs to improve training of students to address urban environmental challenges globally. This training aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 17, “Partnership for the Goals,” which aims to achieve sustainable development goals through partnerships among entities.Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 1, 2025 -
Free, publicly-accessible full text available January 1, 2025
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Temperate forests are threatened by urbanization and fragmentation, with over 20% (118,300 km2) of U.S. forest land projected to be subsumed by urban land development. We leveraged a unique, well-characterized urban-to-rural and forest edge-to-interior gradient to identify the combined impact of these two land use changes—urbanization and forest edge creation—on the soil microbial community in native remnant forests. We found evidence of mutualism breakdown between trees and their fungal root mutualists [ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi] with urbanization, where ECM fungi colonized fewer tree roots and had less connectivity in soil microbiome networks in urban forests compared to rural forests. However, urbanization did not reduce the relative abundance of ECM fungi in forest soils; instead, forest edges alone led to strong reductions in ECM fungal abundance. At forest edges, ECM fungi were replaced by plant and animal pathogens, as well as copiotrophic, xenobiotic-degrading, and nitrogen-cycling bacteria, including nitrifiers and denitrifiers. Urbanization and forest edges interacted to generate new “suites” of microbes, with urban interior forests harboring highly homogenized microbiomes, while edge forest microbiomes were more heterogeneous and less stable, showing increased vulnerability to low soil moisture. When scaled to the regional level, we found that forest soils are projected to harbor high abundances of fungal pathogens and denitrifying bacteria, even in rural areas, due to the widespread existence of forest edges. Our results highlight the potential for soil microbiome dysfunction—including increased greenhouse gas production—in temperate forest regions that are subsumed by urban expansion, both now and in the future.
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Abstract Tree growth is a key mechanism driving carbon sequestration in forest ecosystems. Environmental conditions are important regulators of tree growth that can vary considerably between nearby urban and rural forests. For example, trees growing in cities often experience hotter and drier conditions than their rural counterparts while also being exposed to higher levels of light, pollution, and nutrient inputs. However, the extent to which these intrinsic differences in the growing conditions of trees in urban versus rural forests influence tree growth response to climate is not well known. In this study, we tested for differences in the climate sensitivity of tree growth between urban and rural forests along a latitudinal transect in the eastern United States that included Boston, Massachusetts, New York City, New York, and Baltimore, Maryland. Using dendrochronology analyses of tree cores from 55 white oak trees (
Quercus alba ), 55 red maple trees (Acer rubrum ), and 41 red oak trees (Quercus rubra ) we investigated the impacts of heat stress and water stress on the radial growth of individual trees. Across our three‐city study, we found that tree growth was more closely correlated with climate stress in the cooler climate cities of Boston and New York than in Baltimore. Furthermore, heat stress was a significant hindrance to tree growth in higher latitudes while the impacts of water stress appeared to be more evenly distributed across latitudes. We also found that the growth of oak trees, but not red maple trees, in the urban sites of Boston and New York City was more adversely impacted by heat stress than their rural counterparts, but we did not see these urban–rural differences in Maryland. Trees provide a wide range of important ecosystem services and increasing tree canopy cover was typically an important component of urban sustainability strategies. In light of our findings that urbanization can influence how tree growth responds to a warming climate, we suggest that municipalities consider these interactions when developing their tree‐planting palettes and when estimating the capacity of urban forests to contribute to broader sustainability goals in the future.