By Joern Fischer

Today I’d like to point you to a new publication that just came out in Conservation Letters. It’s a study led by Karen Stagoll, who I’ve had the pleasure to work with when I was still in Canberra. Karen helped me measure trees several years ago. And I guess she found this so much fun that she decided to measure some of her own!

And so she did. Lots of them. In fact, over 3000 trees, all over Australia’s capital city, Canberra. Canberra is known as the ‘bush capital’ because throughout the city there’s a lot of native vegetation — in nature reserves, but also in urban parks. The setting is far from pristine — but it’s also far from the urban concrete jungle that characterises so many other large cities around the world.

In her work, Karen found that urban trees make a major difference…