Urban Forest Indicators for Planning and Designing Future Forests

Forests 2016, 7(9), 208; doi:10.3390/f7090208

Author 

Sara Barron ^1,* , Stephen R.J. Sheppard ¹

 and Patrick M. Condon ²

¹

Forest Resources Management, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada

²

School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Faculty of Applied Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada

^*

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. 

Academic Editors: Francisco Escobedo, Stephen John Livesley and Justin Morgenroth

Received: 8 May 2016 / Revised: 25 August 2016 / Accepted: 9 September 2016 / Published: 16 September 2016

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban and Periurban Forest Diversity and Ecosystem Services)

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Abstract 

This paper describes a research project exploring future urban forests. This study uses a Delphi approach to develop a set of key indicators for healthy, resilient urban forests. Two groups of experts participated in the Delphi survey: International academics and local practitioners. The results of the Delphi indicate that “urban tree diversity” and “physical access to nature” are indicators of high importance. “Tree risk” and “energy conservation” were rated as indicators of relatively low importance. Results revealed some differences between academics and practitioners in terms of their rating of the indicators. The research shows that some indicators rated as high importance are not necessarily the ones measured or promoted by many municipal urban forestry programs. In particular, social indicators of human health and well-being were rated highly by participants, but not routinely measured by urban forestry programs. View Full-Text

Keywords: indicators;  urban forest;  Delphi;  urban design;  green infrastructure;  climate change;  ecosystem services

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).

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