Increasing integration of urban forestry with the wider urban greening agenda seems likely, with urban forestry contributing significantly as a key component of green infrastructure.
Growth in urban populations creates opportunities for urban forests to deliver ecosystem services critical to human wellbeing and biodiversity. Our challenge is to strategically expand urban forests and provide our international communities, particularly the vulnerable, with healthier, happier, and enriched lives. Trees are too often removed for urbanization, well captured by Joni Mitchells lyrics They paved paradise. And put up a parking lot. Urban areas globally will expand to accommodate population growth and migration trends1. Yet, urban denizens benefit greatly with trees in their habitat, and that is the theme of the 2018 International Day of Forests; Forests and Sustainable Cities. Urban areas can concentrate poverty and sickness, and trees can help alleviate these ills through their ecosystem services. Our global challenge is to grow urban forests and sustain human wellbeing and biodiversity. See full list on nature.com Ecosystem services from trees can be categorized as cultural (e.g., spiritual, recreational), provisioning (e.g., food, fiber, water), regulating (e.g., climate and flood control), and supporting (e.g., pollination, soil formation). Causation between tree structure and functional services include the obvious, such as harvesting an apple, to processes that only researchers may notice such as cooling buildings through shading, cooling the air through transpiration, silencing of noise through damping, and cleaning the air and water through filtration. In general, ecosystem services are greater from evergreen trees with large leaf areas due to the functional role of tree canopy3. The Food and Agriculture Organization4 mapped how urban forest advance nine UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, descent work and economic growth, climate action, life on land, and sustainable cities and communities (see Table 1). Preliminary analysis suggests an average return on investment of $2.25 for each $1 invested in urban trees, and this >100% return does not include all services5. Urban forest services are invaluable for the vulnerable and low capacity residents without food, water, and energy security, who can find in these forests nutrition, clean water, wood fuel, and shelter, as well as jobs and a sense of purpose. Full size table See full list on nature.com Barriers to advancing the urban forests include actual, potential, and perceived tree disservices, which are outnumbered by services10. Disservices can vary with income, culture, and environment, making them local phenomena. Financial costs disservices of urban trees arise with planting and management, injury to humans and infrastructure due to acc... See full list on nature.com A virtuous cycle is possible for extending urban forests, with benefits paying for management, and new forests advancing research to maximize services and minimize disservices. The field of urban forestry will grow with that of urban science, which is poised to grow rapidly, generating discoveries at the social-ecological system nexus critical to s... See full list on nature.com Urban forestry is a transdisciplinary field involving the entire community, with its members and their interactions contributing to the many unknowns in formulating holistic policy, science, and management for sustainable cities. Research needs for advancing urban forestry have been summarized by the FAO4, and include environmental, social, and economic aspects, at a range of spatial and temporal scales. The environmental unknowns include establishing tree characteristics and planting opportunities, selecting tree species to increase diversity, service delivery, and forest resilience3, discovering the role of the microbiome in tree health, managing for biotic and abiotic stresses such as pests, fire, and pollution, and linking urban forests and human health, with the latter connecting to social and economic research such as publicprivate partnerships in the payment for ecosystem services. Formal and informal education programs at all age levels are structured around these knowledge gaps, encouraging citizen science, enriching inquiry-based learning, and empowering citizens to speak on behalf of their trees. The way forward for urban forestry is to design landscapes in partnership with the UN SDGs and uphold an international commitment to improving human wellbeing and biodiversity. Urban forest design tools include i-Tree (www.itreetools.org), which enable a leaderless movement where citizens can inventory their urban forests, discover the benefits of different tree species, select optimal planting locations and tree size distributions, and determine how trees clean their air and water, mitigate climate change, and many other services. The urban forest movement will benefit from holistic policy and legal frameworks, strategic planning and design, and adaptive management, monitoring and financing for humans and nature. We need to tell the stories of success from communities across the globe, where fruit harvests supply food banks in Seattle USA, greenbelts treat wastewater and combat desertification in Ouarzazate, Morocco, toxic soils are cleansed by trees in Guangxi, China, urban temperatures and poverty are reduced with forest stands in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, tree nurseries purify drinking water and generate wood fuel for the needy in Dhaka, Bangladesh; and children in an impoverished school are nurtured by a tree garden irrigated with gray-water within the desert landscape of Lima, Peru4. These achievements are grassroots, wholesome, and empowering, and ensure that trees will not be relegated to a museum. See full list on nature.com T.E. thanks S. Borelli, D. Nowak, and P. Rodbell for helpful discussions, and J. Jones16 for historical inspiration. See full list on nature.com Authors and Affiliations Department of Environmental Resources Engineering, SUNY ESF, Syracuse, NY, 13210, USA Theodore A. EndrenyAuthors Theodore A. Endreny View author publicationsYou can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar Contributions T.E. solely contributed to the writing of this piece. Corresponding author Correspondence to Theodore A. Endreny. See full list on nature.com Competing interests The author declares no competing interests. See full list on nature.com Publisher's note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. See full list on nature.com Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the articles Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the articles Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Reprints and permissions See full list on nature.com View all What is an urban forest? An urban forest includes all trees and shrubs within the parks, gardens, streets, woodland and open spaces of a town or city as well as the wildlife living amongst them. For this reason, Forest Research, with partners Brillianto, Trees for Cities, and Woodland Trust, ran a project aiming to complete a TCC Webmap of the UKs 5,749 urban wards. While urban forest is a collective term that encom-passes all trees within a defined urban area, in this case Londons municipal boundary, dis-tinctions are made between two major types of urban forest: Here, we demonstrate a systems-based approach that makes these dependencies, synergies, and tensions more explicit, allowing them to be used to test the decadal-scale resilience of urban street trees. The bright future of urban forestry is evident through its capacity to transform urban environments into sustainable, healthy, and enjoyable spaces. While challenges persist, the continuous advancements in technology and community involvement hold the key to overcoming these obstacles.
What is an urban forest? An urban forest includes all trees and shrubs within the parks, gardens, streets, woodland and open spaces of a town or city as well as the wildlife living amongst them.
For this reason, Forest Research, with partners Brillianto, Trees for Cities, and Woodland Trust, ran a project aiming to complete a TCC Webmap of the UKs 5,749 urban wards.
As we can see from the illustration, Urban Forestry Multi Unit Dwellings has many fascinating aspects to explore.
Here, we demonstrate a systems-based approach that makes these dependencies, synergies, and tensions more explicit, allowing them to be used to test the decadal-scale resilience of urban street trees.
