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With extreme heat affecting communities across the world, Miami-Dade County currently is participating in a national heat study that will analyze the cooling potential of urban natural areas.
Led by the Natural Areas Conservancy, the results of this study, which includes 12 cities across the United States, will help cities address climate change.
Environmental specialists in the Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources’ Division of Environmental Resources Management (DERM) are participating in this study as part of the Forests and Cities network for the summer of 2022.
These researchers are part of DERM’s Environmentally Endangered Lands (EEL) program, and are collaborating to quantify differences in temperature across natural and built environments using satellite data and temperature sensors in urban forested natural areas to test whether healthier ecosystems are cooler than unhealthy ecosystems. These sensors recorded the air temperature every five minutes until the end of September. Some of these temperature sensors are located within EEL’s managed areas in some of the county’s most vulnerable communities: Goulds, the Arch Creek neighborhood and Florida City.
“Miami-Dade County is familiar with hot weather, but we are now experiencing extreme and unprecedented heat in our community,” said Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
“Extreme heat leads to more deaths than all other natural disasters combined, and we must treat it as a public health and safety crisis, similar to how we respond to hurricanes. We are writing the playbook on how to mitigate extreme heat, right here in Miami-Dade.”
The study is currently underway, and the results — expected in winter 2022 — will help the county better understand how environmentally sensitive urban areas can contribute to cooling urban settings and climate change solutions. A planning goal of DERM is to take these findings from the Forest in Cities meta-city study, in addition to county studies, to bring heat relief through planning, outreach, education and environmental initiatives. This work is being done with the support of Chief Heat OfficerJane Gilbert.
This is one of several related studies that DERM has participated in. Others include:
In 2021, DERM partnered with Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and United States Fish and Wildlife Service to understand the climate requirements of a federally endangered fern that is found in portions of the over 27,000 acres of habitat managed by EEL. This microclimate data revealed important requirements of endangered ferns and highlighted ideal temperature levels in these habitats. The results showing how significant the microclimate effects were during May 2022 when compared to weather station data can be seen at https://twitter.com/MiamiDadeRER/status/1560265302403076096.
Miami-Dade County partnered with Florida International University and University of Miami on an on-going citizen science initiative called Shading Dade. Shading Dade has collected over 500,000 temperature and humidity observations over the past five years with outdoor sensors placed throughout the county. Results show that pedestrian-level temperature and heat index are significantly higher than at National Weather Service weather sites and commonly exceed dangerous levels.
Summers are becoming exponentially hotter across the globe, with 2021 being the hottest summer on record in the United States. Cities are documented to be 2-10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than rural areas, and extreme heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States. Planting trees and expanding green spaces are known to combat urban heat, but the magnitude of cooling benefits has not been quantified across different segments of the urban forest, such as between trees in managed and natural landscape, nor across patchwork of land cover types that make up the county.
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