Jamaica Bay Tree Ring: an afforestation handbook

Jamaica Bay Tree Ring

an afforestation handbook _link Publication, 2020, Princeton University, NSF Authors: Guy Nordenson, Paul Lewis, Catherine Seavitt, Joon Ma, Andrew Macmillan Site: Jamaica Bay, NY

Perhaps more than any other region of New York, the changing climate is most visible along the shores of Jamaica Bay. There have already been worsening and higher storm surges. High tide events are now accompanied by sunny-day flooding, damaging infrastructure and housing without the

presence of a storm. Flood maps bleakly erase the entire Rockaway Peninsula by the close of the century. The future of the coastal communities of Jamaica Bay is an increasingly wet and uncertain one, where the escalating costs of shoring those regions against temporary and permanent forms of flooding is becoming an ever greater reality. Climate change

will also have dramatic events on the Bay’s already fragile and complex maritime ecosystem where each ecotone is tightly pressed against the other, threatening always to collapse, but persisting. This proposal seeks to stabilize this ecosystem, through the widespread planting of a coastal forest around the entire Bay and along the seaward side of the Peninsula to provide additional benefits to the region and to assist in coastal

resiliency.