Protect future adapted seedlings and saplings

A wide variety of potentially damaging agents and practices are present in the urban environment, including many direct anthropogenic influences that are less of a concern in nonurban landscapes. Care should be taken to avoid damaging those species, communities, and ecosystems that are likely to be most well adapted to future climates during development of restoration and management projects.

Urban areas already contain a broad mixture of species that come from outside of the area. Because these species evolved in different climates, they will probably have very different tolerances to future climate conditions. In the urban landscape, fostering species transitions is less a question of whether to assist migration of species from other geographies; this is already a common occurrence. Instead, it is more about deciding when and where to incorporate species into forests and plantings in different habitats and land uses. These species could be nonnative taxa or species that are regionally native, that is, those from the same region but not currently growing at that particular location. In addition to increasing the climatic resilience of the urban landscape, urban forests could also facilitate the migration of species that will be favored under future climate to new habitats at or beyond the edges of their current range.