Why are urban forests important?

Forests have a long history of offering goods such as fuel, food, and timber for human well-being. The dynamic form, structure, and seasonal characteristics of trees also contribute to landscape aesthetics and can impart people with strong memories and impressions. Urban forests add additional dimensions to these aesthetic and utilitarian values. They are integral to sustainable livability in urbanized areas because they regulate air pollution, stormwater runoff, and heat island effects, and can mitigate climate change by sequestering and storing carbon. Urban Forests offer cultural, leisure, public health, and economic benefits, and serve as habitat for other city wildlife. In other words, these forests are crucial for providing ecosystem services to urban populations.

What is Urban Forestry?
Over half the world’s population lives in urban areas and can benefit from the ecosystem services that Urban Forests provide. Urban Forests are ecosystems that include rich dynamics between trees and people at different scales ranging from a single tree in a private backyard, a row of street trees in the right-of-way, a patch of woods, to an entire watershed or region. Urban Forestry is the art, science, and technology of managing trees and forest resources in and around urban community ecosystems for the physiological, sociological, economic, and aesthetic benefits trees provide society. As a socio-ecological discipline, transdisciplinary research and practice is needed to integrate the efforts of landowners, city planners, landscape architects, ecologists, foresters, arborists, and users of the urban forests.

Challenges
These urban ecosystems face a variety of land use, design, management, and physical environmental challenges. They can compete for the same space as other development interests such as housing, commercial, utility, and other municipal infrastructure pressures. These multiple demands raise questions such as what land use should take priority? How should Urban Forests be designed for cultural, recreational, conservation, or provisional purposes? Finally, what are the space and growing conditions that urban forests need to thrive, and how can they be integrated with the built environment to function as a cohesive system? Collaboration between public-private entities, landowners, and across disciplines is necessary for effective conservation, management, and expansion.

 
Current Themes for Research & Practice
Relevant research questions for today’s Urban Forests involve identifying the benefits they can provide, careful measurement of these benefits, understanding whether these benefits are distributed equitably across populations, and finally effective governance and integration into urban infrastructure to maximize benefits. These research themes play out against the backdrop of climate changes. Urban forests both mitigate and are impacted by the effects of climate change. Further research is needed to understand mitigation capacity jointly with the impacts of climate change on tree species, distribution, species composition, and urban woodland structures, to make effective management decisions.

     
Inspiration
There are inspiring examples of Urban Forestry all around the world, each working within unique cultural contexts and growing conditions.