Diverging conditions of current and potential future urban forest patches

Forested natural areas in cities provide a range of social, ecological, economic, and health benefits. Ensuring the delivery of these benefits requires an understanding of current and potential future forest conditions yet urban forest dynamics are not well understood. Here, we address this knowledge gap by examining forest structure and composition in 126 plots distributed across three forest patch sizes (large (95-126 ha), medium (1-19 ha), and small (0.05-0.65 ha) patches) in the city of New Haven, CT, USA. We detected significant shifts in forest structure and composition suggesting a suite of distinct successional trajectories within each patch size. Large patches comprised 95% native tree species in the canopy ( > 5 cm DBH), sapling (1-5 cm DBH), and seedling (< 1 cm DBH) layers, suggesting that these large patches will continue to be native-dominated in the future— a primary objective for urban forest management. Moreover, in these large patches, shifts in the dominant spec...