Northeastern University's Oakland campus is planting drought-resistant oak species from Catalina Island and northern Mexico as a hedge against climate models projecting that the coastal live oak's viable habitat could shrink by half within a century.

The four saplings sitting in the ground this month at the former Mills College campus in Oakland are easy to miss — young enough that a visitor walking its oak-shaded paths would not register them as anything but new landscaping. They are not coastal live oaks. That, entirely, is the point.

Northeastern University, which took over the former Mills College site, counts more than 5,000 inventoried trees representing more than 100 species on the campus, which holds Level II arboretum status — including roughly 1,500 coastal live oaks (Quercus agrifolia), the species Oakland is named for. Campus Sustainability Manager Andrew Gonzales, working with collaborators from Northeastern's Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences, planted four saplings of a different kind this month: Quercus tomatella (Catalina Island oak), Quercus rugosa (red netleaf oak), and silver leaf oak from northern Mexico, all sourced from Devil's Mountain Nursery. Twenty to thirty more are planned for the coming academic year.

The logic is adaptation ahead of need. Some climate models project that the coastal live oak's viable habitat could shrink by as much as half over the next 50 to 100 years, under pressure from drought, heat, pests, and disease. "Part of the reason why we're picking these trees is because they're drought tolerant," Gonzales told Northeastern's news outlet this month, "and some have shown a little bit more disease and pest resiliency than the coastal live oak."

The goal is not to displace the oaks that define the campus canopy but to test whether related species — already adapted to hotter, drier conditions further south — can establish themselves here while the question is still theoretical. Katie Lotterhos, a professor at Northeastern's Marine Science Center who studies climate's effects on biodiversity, offered a note of caution in the same article: a successful transplant could help "pre-adapt" existing trees to climate change, she noted, but genetic incompatibilities could produce the opposite effect.

The program carries no official name and no formal press release. What it has is a well-canopied proving ground in a part of Oakland where green space is comparatively dense. Gordon Matassa, an arboricultural inspector with the City of Oakland, noted in the same article that the campus's tree cover carries an outsized health impact on surrounding neighborhoods, which have far fewer trees. Gonzales has invited Oakland city representatives to follow the saplings' progress over time, with an eye toward whether the approach might scale to broader urban planting initiatives.

"It's something near and dear to the Oakland community," Gonzales told Northeastern News. "It will be an interesting future in 100 years, let's say, if maybe only one out of 10 of these oaks are surviving."

For now, four saplings are in the ground at the former Mills campus. Someone walking past tomorrow would not notice them.