Grantham Scholar Safia El Amiri’s project will use a multidisciplinary toolkit to investigate how pollution and other urban stressors affects the health of urban street trees and their associated insect fauna.
The project aims to better understand how various anthropogenic stressors such as pollution exposure and drought, impact tree growth and health at a number of different spatial scales, and how subsequently invertebrate communities that rely on street trees are impacted. The project makes use of the UTO (urban tree observatory) a network of instrumented trees, made up of four different species, within the city of Sheffield measuring four different variables such as sap flow and air temperature. Metabolomics will also be used to explore how anthropogenic stressors induce biochemical changes within plants.