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Educational Sessions

Opening General Session

L.C. Chadwick Award Recipient
Monday, 10 August 2015
9:00 AM — 10:00 AM
Osceola Ballroom C
A, T, L, Bs
Recognizes individuals whose research has contributed valuable information to arboriculture.

Seeing the Urban Forest for the Trees

David J. Nowak

Good arboricultural practices are essential to sustaining healthy trees. However, individual trees in cities en masse create new management issues for sustaining healthy and viable urban forest populations. Though the individual tree is important, it is the forest population that is essential to society. Just as doctors care for individuals, arborists care for trees. Still, there are numerous groups and agencies dedicated to help ensure the welfare of society and populations (e.g., US Census Bureau, Center for Disease Control, US Department of Health and Human Services).  These larger scale issues, such as population health and demographics, are where urban forestry plays an essential role in sustaining forest health and services for current and future generations. While the health of trees is rooted at the health of the individual, the health of the overall forest is rooted in understanding larger scale issues that affect long-term health and sustainability of the entire resource. Both the tree and forest are intertwined, but we cannot lose focus on the larger societal and forest issues when dealing with individual trees. Local scale actions can have significant impacts on cumulative forest effects. Complicating the issue of moving from tree-based management to urban forest-based management is not only the desires of numerous people in cities, but also variations in the forest resources across space and time. This presentation will explore the values of the urban forest as a national resource, threats to sustaining the health of this resource and steps to ensure the sustainability of urban forests at the city and parcel scale. Understanding the necessity, values and issues of the urban forest will better enable arborists to link their tree scale work to larger societal issues related to sustaining urban forests.

Presenter Information

    • David Nowak
      Dr. David Nowakis a Project Leader with the USDA Forest Service in Syracuse, NY. Dr. Nowak received a B.S. and M.S. from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His research investigates urban forest structure, health, and change, and its effect on human health and environmental quality. He has authored over 225 publications and leads teams developing software tools to quantify ecosystem services from urban vegetation.

      United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Syracuse, New York, USA

Presentation file information