Maya Mangala-Munuma '25 first noticed it in her hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. When she walked from an affluent neighborhood to a more impoverished one, it wasn't just the houses and demographics...

Maya Mangala-Munuma ’25 first noticed it in her hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. When she walked from an affluent neighborhood to a more impoverished one, not only the houses and demographics changed. The trees did, too. “You go from a really nice neighborhood with big, gorgeous, established trees, and then there’s essentially a line where all of a sudden the trees don’t look the same,” Mangala-Munuma said. “I wanted to know why and if it’s actually a phenomenon.” She pursued the question for her undergraduate honors thesis at Cornell and is now first author of the resulting study, published in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening on Sept. 17, that finds a wide discrepancy in tree health along socioeconomic lines across 29 U.S. cities. Using public data on representative city plots, Mangala-Munuma and her team found that, on average, 17% of trees were damaged in the whitest, most affluent neighborhoods, compared to nearly 60% in impoverished, racially diverse neighborhoods. The trees in minority neighborhoods also had 7% fewer leaves and were more likely to be dead. “This is a pretty striking finding, and it’s not just one city – it’s across all of them,” said senior author and Mangala-Munuma’s adviser Daniel...

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