The MacArthur Foundation awarded “genius” grants this year to A. Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist who is developing a wildfire forecasting model after studying climate change and tree mortality, and Lucy Hutyra, an environmental ecologist whose studies show that conserving urban forest fragments helps mitigate local impacts of climate change. The $800,000 grants, disbursed over five years, are intended “to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society,” says the foundation, based in Chicago.
In his research, Williams, 42, determined that vapor pressure deficit, a measure of dry air, is a critical factor in drought stress on forests and the amount of land burned by a wildfire. Williams and a colleague “estimate that anthropogenic climate change caused double the amount of forest to burn in the western United States in 1985 to 2015, compared to what would have burned without human influences,” said the foundation.
Hutyra, 47, and colleagues put her research to practical use a few years ago in an app, Right Place, Right Tree–Boston, to help city planners select areas that would benefit from increased tree canopies and choose the tree species that were appropriate for those locations. Nearly a quarter of the trees in the U.S. Northeast are at the edge of a forest. Those trees grow faster and lock up carbon more rapidly than trees inside the forest, according to Hutyra’s research, and soils in urban fragmented forests release carbon from the soil at slower rates than fragmented forests in rural areas.
Williams is affiliated with UCLA and Hutyra with Boston University .