More than one fifth of New York City is built on what used to be open water, marsh or tidal flats, according to new mapping by scientists at the New York Botanical Garden. Those spots, dubbed “blue zones,” include parks, public housing, airports and entire neighborhoods that still flood now or are likely to flood as sea levels rise and storms get nastier. City planners say the overlap of historic wetlands with today’s dense development is setting up hard decisions about where to pour money into floodproofing and where, eventually, to move housing and services.
How the Map Was Made
The Garden’s researchers combined their Welikia historical ecology reconstructions with modern flood datasets to find places that once held rivers, marshes or tidal flats…..