“As a heat scholar, I look at palm trees and I think that they don’t really do much in terms of heat mitigation,” said Turner, whose work focuses on cities adapting to hotter conditions. “A pole on the side of the street isn’t providing much shade. And a palm tree is kind of similar.”

With their towering trunks and thick fronds, palms have long dominated the skyline of the Los Angeles Basin, symbolizing for many the region’s sunny promise of prosperity. As such, they are important to local economies and embedded in the region’s cultural identity. None are native to the area, however.

In the 1800s and 1900s, new Angelenos imported palms from elsewhere in the world. In the 1930s, the city underwent its biggest palm planting boom, with more than 25,000 palms planted in 1931 alone.