48 2005; Budruk et al. 2009), open spaces (Chiesura 2004), and greenways (Gobster and Westphal 2004) that do not necessarily contain trees. In some stud- ies, values are explored in the context of damage events (e.g., hurricanes, Hull 1992), which generate interesting results but are difficult to replicate. Most attitude and benefits studies have relied on phone and postal surveys with only a few prompted cat- egories (e.g., Kalmbach and Kielbaso 1979; Schro- eder and Ruffolo 1996; Johnston and Shimada 2004; Lohr et al. 2004; Schroeder et al. 2006; Zhang and Zheng 2011). These methods limit respondents’ expressions and direct experiences of the urban forest, a crucial aspect in capturing people’s values (Satterfield 2001; Owen et al. 2009). Although visual-elicitation (e.g., Tyrväinen et al. 2007) and qualitative (e.g., Chiesura 2004; Jay and Schraml 2009) studies address some of these limitations, they found it difficult to avoid small sample size and participant self-selection. Finally, most studies on public opinion about urban forests are from the U.S. and Europe. Studies in other countries and continents are rare, and assuming similar urban forest values between countries may be inadequate. To address these gaps, this paper reports the results from a study that elicited information on how the public assigns importance to urban forests in three Canadian cities using a sidewalk intercep- tion survey method. This study was different in four important ways: 1) it captures expressions of importance from respondents, instead of expres- sions of preference or attitudes towards urban forests; 2) it focuses on all the trees of the city, or urban forests, instead of other elements of urban nature, such as open greenspaces (with no trees); 3) it focuses on ideas that emerge from interpreting verbatim responses instead of using prompted cat- egories; and 4) it provides respondents with a direct experience of urban forests by non-selectively recruiting them from urban treed spaces, an important aspect of some qualitative studies where respondents express themselves in more intimate ways, in contrast of reacting to a question out of context (see Jay and Schraml 2009). Canadian urban forests are ideal to explore urban forest values, as around 80% of Canada’s population is concentrated in urban areas (Statistics Canada 2006), and urban forests are deemed an impor- tant element of Canadian urban sustainability (van ©2016 International Society of Arboriculture Ordóñez et al.: Determining Public Values of Urban Forests Wassenaer et al. 2000). Although there are some local efforts to capture public urban forest values, some of these do not provide an understanding of people’s priorities (e.g., Fraser and Kenney 2000). Other studies, in some ways, are complementary qualitative explorations to this study (e.g., Peck- ham et al. 2013; Sinclair et al. 2014), but suffer of a small sample size. The current study addresses these limitations and complements these efforts. METHODS A sidewalk interception, or street-intercept, survey method is based on a non-selective recruitment of respondents from the streets in direct contact with their surroundings to gain quick access to their information (Lewis-Beck et al. 2003). This method can potentially provide high-quality data with reliable demographic profiles (Mulhall et al. 2008). Researchers applied this method to capture data on how people assign importance to the urban forest in three Canadian cities were chosen because they were home to the collabo- rating universities. A one-page questionnaire was designed and delivered orally to non-selectively recruited pedestrians from the street. The survey took three to five minutes to complete. It was carried out in local streets of Fredericton, New Brunswick; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Winnipeg, Manitoba, between 2010 and 2012 in the sum- mer or autumn months (before leaf fall). The surveys were done from late August to early November in Fredericton and Halifax and from mid-July to late September in Winnipeg. Four survey delivery sites were chosen in each city based on a combination of high pedestrian traffic and onsite treed spaces, including sites close to forested urban parks, commercial streets with a few trees, and mixed sites with mature trees (e.g., Odell Park, in Fredericton; corner of Spring Garden and South Park, in Halifax; Assini- boine Park entrance, in Winnipeg). Researchers delivering the survey, termed here interview- ers, had the instruction of achieving at least 100 responses at each location. To avoid confusion, the survey used lay terms to refer to urban forests. Urban forests were referred to as “all the trees in the city,” and urban-forest values were cap- tured as answers to the question, “What do you consider important about the trees in the city?”
January 2016
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