Response to Guerin et al. Comment on ’Mapping the climate risk to urban forests at city scale’

Abstract

Urban forests are broadly considered as a nature-based solution; however, they are also vulnerable to climate change, highlighting the need to identify species and cities at risk. A novel approach was developed to identify species and locations at potential climatic risk using the safety margin (i.e., a metric of species’ climate sensitivity) (Esperon-Rodriguez et al., 2024a). A recent comment on this approach by Guerin et al. (2025) found no relationship between safety margin estimates with hydraulic vulnerability; therefore, they raised caution about using climate-based methods to assess species’ climate risk. Here, we present evidence that a relative tolerance rank (i.e., a metric of performance that spans multiple traits) does indeed show a positive relationship with safety margin. We also found evidence that the species safety margin correlated negatively to crown dieback observed during extreme heat and drought. While caveats are advised when using climate-based methods, we suggest that these methods can provide context-specific insights for urban forest management, bridging the gap between broad climatic tolerances and local environmental conditions.