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Urban Forests - Part Two
Going Green
Going Green: Urban Forests - Part Two
The urban forest provides a multitude of benefits. The trees in the parks and along the city streets help remove air pollution, provide carbon sequestration, energy conservation and protection against ultraviolet radiation. So you might think the more trees a city has, the better.
In general, the more trees the better. It’s how we design the forest. It’s what we try to look at in our research such as which species should we have in the forest and where should they be because it’s a question of what do you want to improve.
David Nowak of the U.S Forest Service and his unit use satellite data to make maps to understand the forest distribution:
Here’s Onondaga County, Albany County, and Monroe County.
And here’s a high-resolution map of the city of Syracuse.
And they’ve developed a computer program to analyze data collected in a ground inventory of how many trees, what species, and where are they located.
The program is called I Tree available for free at itreetools dot org
And then we load in pollution data from the U.S. EPA, we load in the local weather data and simulate with our models what’s the pollution level, what’s the carbon storage, what’s the energy conservation and the dollar value effects so you can start doing this cost-benefit.
We tell our students in the classroom it’s like trying to manage a grocery store without knowing what’s on your shelves. You know there’s stuff out there you see it. We see the trees all the time.
It’s a lot better to have hard numbers and that’s what I Tree tries to give you is a statistical sampling design which will give you numbers that there are this many trees with species composition and running it through the model to say here’s the annual effect of the various benefits.
And then city managers can make realistic decisions for their urban forest. I’m Terry Ettinger for Going Green.
