The Buffalo Niagara River Land Trust Speaker Series brings together the community and experts to explore how we can reclaim and restore Western New York’s waterfronts.

Through these conversations, we highlight our mission to clean, protect, and keep these places in trust—ensuring public access, environmental health, and community pride for generations to come.

We’ll ask, What is a brownfield? What is the difference between a Land Bank, a Land Conservancy, and a Land Trust? We will learn about phytoremediation–the use of plants and trees that are especially good for removing contaminants from the soil, groundwater, and sediment–think cattails and cottonwood trees.

Buffalo’s industrial legacy has left a mosaic of brownfields, rail yards, and abandoned factories that now represent a new frontier for ecological restoration. The Gray to Green initiative is a framework for integrating post-industrial lands into the Niagara River Greenway system to enhance ecological connectivity, urban resilience, and community well-being. Drawing from the city’s history of industrialization and environmental degradation, we explore how novel ecosystems in anthropogenic soils can support native plant communities, pollinator guilds, and essential ecosystem services. We will contextualize these efforts within broader goals of environmental equity, public health, and economic revitalization, proposing Buffalo as a living laboratory for restoration ecology in the Rust Belt. By transforming industrial grayfields into regenerative green spaces, Buffalo can model the future of sustainable post-industrial cities.

CC - Turning Gray to Green: Post-Industrial Restoration and Urban Ecological Connectivity in Buffalo, NY

Featuring Nicholas Henshue, M.S. Ph.D., Associate Professor of Ecology in UB’s Department of Environment and Sustainability, and SUNY Sustainability Fellow