2025-09-17 Dexter Locke: The When, Where, and How of Urban Tree Cooling in Cities

Every year people die because of extreme heat. Urban trees help combat the lethality of an increasing planet, where cities are even warmer. Meanwhile, vegetation provides shade and evapotranspirative cooling, which lower temperatures, and therefore may save lives. Lessons learned from a review of more than 115 research papers from across the globe on urban vegetation and heat from 2018 to 2024 will be shared. The When, Where, and How of urban cooling will be discussed, with attention to current knowledge and knowledge gaps. Next, we will zoom into New Haven, CT to examine how bike-mounted temperature sensors better reflect the lived experience, and to show local-level cooling from tree canopy cover with and without cloud cover. The goals are to describe the state of the field and to provide a specific, place-based example of how trees provide cooling at the human scale.


Presenter Bio:
Dexter Locke is a Geographer and Data Scientist at the USDA Forest Service's Baltimore Field Station. He thrives in sifting through piles of messy data never designed to be integrated to extract insights and answer questions relevant to urban natural resource managers. Conducting applied research with partners is his passion. His degrees are in Natural Resources Planning from the University of Vermont, Environmental Science from the Yale School of Environment, and Geography from Clark University. Dexter was the UEC co-chair from 2017 to 2020. On July 24th, he became a father.