Tiny forests make big impact on and off campus

With Earth Day less than a month away, students and faculty at the University of Cincinnati are taking the first steps at making the city greener through the installation of tiny forests. 

What started as a group project between students has grown into a sustainable option for carbon reduction and elimination in Cincinnati, which is one of the only cities in Ohio to have tiny forests.

That project has grown to include a collaboration across these colleges: Arts and Sciences; Engineering; Design, Art, Architechure and Planning; and the Lindner College of Business.

Tiny forests are a densely populated, biodiverse woodlands, often smaller that a tennis court or a couple of parking spaces. They include native species that create a self-sustaining ecosystem within three to five years. Originally developed by Japanese botanist Akira Mayawaki, they are used to both remove and reduce carbon from the atmosphere.

Locally, tiny forests have become more popular in urban areas. One site being considered for a tiny forest is near Camp Washington, near the CSX railroads.

In 2024, a group of UC students worked together to install a tiny forest and study its carbon reduction. That tiny forest would later introduce the city to an innovative way to approach urban greenspaces. 

“I was an environmental engineer last year, so for my capstone we had to implement the tiny forest,” said Zachary Torres, a graduate student enrolled in UC Business Administration. “The method has actually been around, since the 70s, using the Miyawaki method.” 

 Developed for urban areas and used in nations where reforestation is needed, a group of UC students took that idea into their own hands and brought Ohio’s only tiny forest to life at the UC Field Center. In the same year, another tiny forest was installed on UC’s campus at the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP)’s Annex site at 429 Riddle Road. 

“We’re out of balance,” said Ralph Brueggeman, an adjunct professor at the UC’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. “Because of the urbanization issue, we don’t have a lot of land, so we want to put down wherever there is room and we only have 100 acres in Cincinnati to use. So maybe we can put these in areas next to highways, in parks, in any location that has space.”

Tiny forests are an urban asset as they are designed to be small, dense forest areas that are installed with specifically curated soil for the plants that will be included. Trees, shrubs and native plants are added to the tiny forest, and the curated soil will promote quick growth. As the plants age and die, nutrients from those plants make the living plants stronger while improving the biomass of the soil. 

“We were able to get handheld sensors that record two month's worth of data in regards to soil, moisture, nutrient contents,” Torres said, “To see if soil was actually getting better and then the goal of it is that, in three or four years, you could actually be able to quantify the amount of carbon that is captured.”

Torres talked about software that members of the team developed utilizing a Physiological Processes Predicting Growth or 3PG model to record the data and predict the carbon capture of that specific forest. Brueggeman was one of the professors involved in the installation of student-developed sensors into DAAP’s tiny forest site. 

“Decarbonization is what we want to achieve because we want to reduce and remove CO2,” Brueggeman said. “Reduce and remove, use climate solutions and use engineering solutions.” 

When more people drive electric vehicles or purchase technology that runs on renewable energy, that can reduce the amount of carbon that is produced in the atmosphere, but Brueggeman points out that efforts relying solely on reductive solutions can only get us so far in the fight to actually remove CO2.

“We also have to remove CO2 and there’s certain things that we need to do to go beyond reducing and there are two solutions: one is climate solution and the other is engineered removals,” Brueggeman said. “So, what we want to achieve is net zero.”

 Tiny forests are especially effective at removing that leftover carbon through photosynthesis, which takes carbon out of the atmosphere and into the wood, and those plants replace it with oxygen. 

While few tiny forests have been created in Ohio, many outside of UC have had their eye on the progress UC’s tiny forests have been making. 

“This past summer, we were contacted by Taking Root,” said Petren. “It’s a local organization. They are planting native species, and they heard through the grapevine that we have a tiny forest.”

“It’s grown very quickly, it looks like a mini jungle, so it’s small but it inspired them,” Petren said. Data was shared from the Field Center’s tiny forest and the soil recipe was gathered, and now Taking Root has partnered with Petren to apply for a grant that would help fund another tiny forest. 

“They’ve put in a proposal to the Cincinnati Bell Foundation to build four tiny forests in two years,” Petren said. “I think the city park foundation has chimed in with another $10,000, so we’ll be planting tiny forests a little bigger than the ones we planted here, which makes sense because ours was just a little example.”

Petren explained that for an urban area like Cincinnati, tiny forests “make a lot of sense.”

“Sites we’re looking at could be a border along a highway and an off-ramp. It could help provide a border shielding from emission, light and noise,” Petren said. “The grant has been approved, so its just about getting formal approval in the next month or two, and then we could actually go and potentially break ground in the next couple of weeks.” 

Featured image at top: Hands holding a seedling. Photo/AVAKAphoto for Pixabay.