Soil Tests in Urban Parks: Assessing the Impacts of Dog Use

As cities become denser, park usage naturally increases, and it becomes more important for landscape architects to understand the carrying capacity of urban soils to support trees in parks and streetscapes. This project seeks to develop a standard test to quantify dogs’ impact on these elements through a combination of lab-based soil testing and field observations. Building on existing soil tests that measure nitrogen and phosphorus—key outputs from dogs—it will also investigate bacterial presence and identify other toxins toward an examination of how dog activity patterns create concentrated areas of damage in parks.