Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 42(1): January 2016 et al. 2011). Women, high-income residents, those affiliated with environmental organizations, and those who have a tree in front of their home, may have a more positive attitude towards urban trees (Gorman 2004; Jones et al. 2013). Studies focusing on the reasons why people have a positive attitude towards urban trees state that the most common rea- sons are aesthetics, shade, and property values (e.g. Sommer et al. 1990; Schroeder and Ruffolo 1996). However, many of these studies provide few insights about how people assign environmental, ecological, psychological, or sociocultural importance to urban forests. Moreover, many of these studies result in a list of reasons of why people do not like urban trees, making it difficult to understand people’s priorities. A notable contribution to understanding how people assign importance to the urban forest is by studies of urban forest services, benefits, and val- ues. In its widest definitions, an ecosystem service refers to natural processes that satisfy human and non-human needs (Fisher et al. 2009). The literature on urban forest services has contributed immensely to researchers’ understanding of what urban trees do to influence the quality of life of urban citizens and the economic aspects of urban forests (Roy et al. 2012). However, this research is usually not based in public opinion. Moreover, by striving to quantify services through monetary valuation methods, most of this research does not capture unquantifiable psychosocial themes (see Ruckelshaus et al. 2013). An ecosystem benefit generally refers to what people receive from an ecosystem, not just in terms of life-supporting functions, but also in psychosocial and economic terms (Dwyer et al. 1992; McPherson 2003). In one important study, respondents identified shade and calming effects as the most important benefits of urban forests, with female and older respondents, and those with a higher income, more likely to agree that urban trees were important to life quality (Lohr et al. 2004). However, many such benefit explorations also end up in a list of negative concerns, such as allergies or leaf collection (e.g., McPherson and Simpson 2002; Lohr et al. 2004). Furthermore, some benefit studies have attempted to quantify them monetarily (e.g., McPherson 2003; Payton et al. 2008), thus missing many psycho-social themes. Values are broadly conceived as the fundamen- tal belief system informing a person’s opinions and 47 conduct (Rokeach 1973) and are inherently positive constructs (Schwartz and Bilsky 1990). Despite the fact that a value is not a quality of an object itself (Schultz 2002), people can express a rich emotional and cognitive association with a natural element or an ecosystem (Dutcher et al. 2007). Some researchers argue that values are deeply considered, stable con- structs, and cannot be explored through objects because this risks them being confused with attitudes or preferences, which are variable (Schwartz 1992; Rohan 2000). A criticism of the literature based on this notion of values is that most of it does not effec- tively capture the values people hold in relation to nature and the environment (Dietz et al. 2005). Most researchers interested in understanding ecosystem values are not concerned with whether people have a positive attitude towards nature or not, but rather how they assign importance to nature (Dietz et al. 2005; Reser and Bentrupperbäumer 2005). Based on this interpretation, people’s values have been explored in specific natural contexts, such as for- ests. Research shows that people value forests due to their contributions to human health and well-being, and their intrinsic ecological importance (Bengston 1994; Treiman and Gartner 2005; Owen et al. 2009). Based on this discussion, the research based on the concepts of preference, concern, attitude, service, and benefit provides very useful insight on how people perceive urban forests, but it is limited in capturing expressions of importance related to them. Many see values as a better concept for expressing how people assign importance to nature (Dietz et al. 2005) and defining what is important to sustain about an eco- system (Lockwood 1999). Although there are clearly other constraints to urban forest management, including landform and other geographical con- siderations (Conway and Hackworth 2007), public values in relation to urban forests are vital determi- nants of the direction of urban forest management. Taking this into consideration, one can identify some gaps in the urban forest values literature. First, urban forest values are frequently explored in spaces, conceptually or physically, that do not rep- resent the ecosystem as a whole or that encompass other natural elements besides trees. Some rel- evant studies have focused on street trees (Flanni- gan 2005; Schroeder et al. 2006), urban woodlands (Tyrväinen et al. 2007; Hunter 2001), or generic spaces, such as greenspaces (Balram and Dragievi ©2016 International Society of Arboriculture
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