Kaisa Rissanen, a postdoctoral fellow in the PaqLab, along with other researchers including lab alumini Gauthier Lapa and Alain, recently published a paper in Agricultural and Forest Meterology. The paper entitled Large variation in the radial patterns of sap flow among urban trees addresses the knowledge gap of sap flow patterns in urban trees. Understanding sap flow in cities is important because some of the benefits that urban trees provide, like cooling their surrounding environment, depend on their water uptake and transpiration. Using the Norway maple (Acer platanoides), silver maple (Acer saccharinum), and littleleaf linden (Tilia cordata) as examples, they assessed the sap flow at four sapwood depths for trees living in parks and streets in the city of Montreal. They found that the radial pattern of sap flow varied greatly between individual trees and even within some trees depending on the time of the year. These results introduce a great uncertainty when calculating daily water use of urban trees which makes it difficult to quantify their resulting benefits. The large amount of variation the researchers discovered in sap flow will therefore be a subject to research further in the future.

Congratulations to Kaisa and the team on publishing this paper!