Charity is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth System Science at UCI working with Benis Egoh. Charity, a Fulbright alumna, earned her PhD in Environmental Science from the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF). Her research interests are the intersections of human well-being and the environment, environmental justice, and the links between ecosystem services and biodiversity. For her PhD, she worked with Professor Charles Kroll, an environmental modeler, to quantify ecosystem services and benefits from urban trees in New York, and to assess the equity of these ecosystem services and developed a multi-objective decision support framework for urban planners. At UCI, she works on a Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions project to develop and communicate strategies to better manage California’s natural lands for climate change.

Focused on distributive equity, the manuscript uses census block group data and quantitative approaches to assess both equality and equity (Mann-Kendall trend test, Lorenz curves, Gini coefficient, Sen slope estimator, Atkinson inequality index and Theil entropy index) and whether there is an equitable distribution of ecosystem services from trees among various socio-demographic and socio-economic variables in the Bronx, NY

The manuscript uses spatially-explicit i-Tree ecosystem service models and mapping tools (https://www.itreetools.org) to assess ecosystem services and benefits (in either biophysical or monetary terms related to PM_2.5 air pollutant, stormwater runoff and temperature and heat index reductions) of recent plantings at the census block level in the Bronx, NY. Estimates were made for 2010 baseline tree cover and three scenarios of tree cover in 2030.