Accessing Culturally Significant Species in New York City, USA’s Urban Forest: The Case of Ginkgo biloba and Morus spp. Harvesting from Street Trees by Chinese-American Residents and Their Descendants

Emerging scholarship on urban forests indicates that diverse green spaces provide immigrant populations opportunities to maintain their cultural identities. Modes of engagement in these spaces vary, but urban foraging represents one culturally significant mode for a number of sociocultural groups. While foraging has been recognized as a ubiquitous practice, studies of biocultural aspects of foraging remain underdeveloped. For example, it remains unclear whether or not culturally significant species are accessible to the particular sociocultural groups that harvest them. To examine this research gap, we draw on interviews with New York City foragers who self-identify as Chinese or Chinese-American and who indicate that fruits from ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) and mulberry (Morus spp.) are important foraged biocultural items. To assess accessibility, we generated GIS hot spots of each species from the city’s street tree census and assessed the overlap of these hot spots with neighborhood tabulation areas (NTAs) with high percentages of residents who self-identify as Chinese or Chinese-American. Our results suggest that Ginkgo street trees in Manhattan are highly accessible, while a subset in Brooklyn are moderately accessible and a smaller subset in Queens are relatively inaccessible. These findings suggest that street trees have the potential to support biocultural foraging practices, even in some of the most developed portions of our cities.