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.