I guess this ole’ dog IS doing his duty to help….
And I LOVE working in my backyard…..
And it’;s about the soil….
As cities look for ways to mitigate the effects of global warming, urban green spaces are often cited as a potential solution. Green spaces can reduce temperatures in cities where paved surfaces magnify hot weather, and they can capture storm water to reduce flooding as climate change leads to increasing rainfall in some parts of the country.
Until now most research in this vein focused on larger green spaces like parks, which could give the impression that smaller spaces like yards do not contribute to the bigger urban ecosystem.
“But what we realized is that people’s backyards are a really big player here,” Ms. Ziter said.
To get a more nuanced picture of the services that green spaces provide in a city, Ms. Ziter took soil samples from 100 sites in Madison. The sites ranged from forests to grasslands to open spaces, a category that includes parks, golf courses and cemeteries. She also sampled from residential lots, which cover 47 percent of Madison’s landscape (but only parts of those lots are yards).
The study showed that the soil in forest ecosystems was best at absorbing water. But soil on open and developed land — like golf courses and backyard lawns — was better at absorbing carbon.
It was not clear why the soil in residential green spaces was better at sequestering carbon, but Ms. Ziter thinks it might be related to how people manage their yards, like by mowing. So there is a risk that the carbon we release using gas-powered lawn mowers, for example, could eclipse the soil’s ability to absorb carbon.
And before we start chopping down forests and putting in lawns, it is important to note that the study focused on soils, not on what may be growing above…..
image…A soil sample collected by Ms. Ziter. Her findings suggest people’s backyards may do more to store carbon than previously thought.CreditCarly Ziter