Under the leadership of Aaron Sexton, our new Urban Plant Ecology Lab seeks to understand how urban ecosystem management influences biodiversity patterns and processes. Research focuses around urban plant and animal communities how they influence human-nature interactions. Research topics include how urban community gardens affect pollinators and natural enemies of pests, restoration of plant-pollinator communites, urban heat island effects on timing of flowering, and impacts of urban wildfires. Techniques range from ecological field work, large-scale data synthesis, and socioecological research including collaborations around New York State, New York City and in Europe.

The Katz Lab focuses on modeling airborne pollen concentrations, quantifying the cooling effects of urban trees, and applying ecological concepts to more effectively use remote sensing for urban tree identification. "My goal is to generate the ecological knowledge necessary to address plant-related public health problems," said Dan Katz, assistant professor in the Soil and Crop Sciences Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science. "To do so, I measure ecological processes using field studies, scale from individual plants to landscapes with remote sensing, and combine these into models related to ecosystem services and disservices."

CEA is an advanced and intensive form of hydroponically-based agriculture using sophisticated lighting and environmental control systems that help make indoor farming more efficient and sustainable. See also: Greenhouse Lighting and Systems Engineering (GLASE) – a public-private partnership led by Cornell and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to integrate advanced energy-efficient LED lighting with improved environmental controls for more efficient and sustainable greenhouse production.

In 2024, several large wildfires scorched dozens of wooded acres in several boroughs of New York City – a region previously thought to be relatively safe from fire risk. Because such fires are so rare, these sites offer a unique and exciting opportunity to study changes in plant communities caused by fire and develop ecological management strategies to prevent even more dangerous fires in the future by reducing the fire fuel-load. In 2025, our Urban Plant Ecology Lab began surveying two of the largest NYC wildfire sites – in Prospect Park in Brooklyn & Inwood Hill Park in Manhattan, and is already seeing some interesting results!