Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 48(1): January 2022 materials by organizations such as the City of Port- land, Oregon (City of Portland Environmental Ser- vices 2017), and the Golden Gate Audubon Society (2017) of San Francisco, California. The majority of academic literature on the connection between the practice of urban forestry and wildlife management centered on the habitat value of urban forests (Strohbach et al. 2013; Wood and Esaian 2020) and on the role of various arboricultural practices, such as pruning practices, in supporting or reducing those habitat values (Kane et al. 2015; Marlès Magre et al. 2019). Conservation and disturbance ecology litera- ture offered useful frameworks to assess direct and indirect disturbances to wildlife, for example through studies of the effects of disturbance from human pres- ence (Lethlean et al. 2017) and anthropogenic noise (Job et al. 2016; Shannon et al. 2016), though the pro- cess for matching these effects to tree care operations was difficult. When it came to knowing how tree care professionals should act in the field to mitigate impacts to wildlife, there was little to no information to be found. A key part of building the best management prac- tices was a policy review of relevant state and federal regulations, to situate the recommendations appropri- ately within the legal landscape. Despite many known wildlife regulations in the state of California, how and how often these regulations were enforced in tree care operations was largely unknown. At the federal level in the United States, legislation such as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Endangered Species Act, and Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, enforced by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, can also all be applied to tree care workers should their work result in the injury or killing of the species they protect. These laws tend to be broad and results-based, not focusing on the activities conducted but whether or not the activities result in disturbance, injury, or death of wildlife. The laws also come with serious fines and prison time, depending on the seriousness of the offense, though it is also not widely known if more than threats have ever been levied against members of the tree care industry. Based on the experience of the members of our coalition, tree care workers in the Western US are much more likely to be subject to harsh criticism and negative publicity from the public than to legal consequences. Another challenge encountered when settling on the scope of our project was whether to focus solely on birds or to widen the scope to include all wildlife 3 taxa. We had run into the much discussed “bird bias” in urban wildlife discourses. This bias is evident both in the abundance of bird-focused wildlife studies in comparison to other taxa (Magle et al. 2012; Perry et al. 2020), the strength of bird advocacy organizations in the United States, such as the Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy, and the number of laws and regulations focused solely on birds, such as the Migratory Birds Treaty Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. Combined with the desire to set goals that would result in the reduction of impacts to more urban wild- life than solely birds was the tension between the cat- egorization of nuisance wildlife as “bad” and other wildlife, especially native, as “good” (Perry et al. 2020). Should the best management practices advise tree care professionals to act differently near beloved, charismatic, or rare species compared to others? What value framework should the guidelines be based around? As the arborists and urban foresters in our working group discovered these prominent dis- courses in the urban wildlife world, the wildlife advo- cates likewise learned of the many shades of opinions around issues such as training, certification, and tree risk management. Early discussions and research in this project revealed how complex a role tree care professionals occupy in the care of urban nature. Research and pub- lic advocacy abounds on the value and benefits of urban forests (Roy et al. 2012; Silvera Seamans 2013; Krajter Ostoić and Konijnendijk van den Bosch 2015). It is also widely held that the health of urban forests relies on a professionally trained workforce (Koeser et al. 2013; Koeser et al. 2016). Strong belief in the benefits of trees and the essentiality of tree care work is also core to the identities of arborists and urban foresters (Young 2010; Vogt et al. 2016; O’Her- rin et al. 2020). Despite, or perhaps because of, these positive framings, arboriculture and urban forestry as fields can struggle to integrate negative impacts of the essential practices of the industry into their narra- tives. For example, though the industry proclaims broadly the importance of urban forests in mitigating climate change, the several studies that have shown the significant carbon emissions from tree care machinery and practices have not yet resulted in broad efforts to reduce the industry’s own carbon footprint (Nowak et al. 2002; Strohbach et al. 2012; McPherson et al. 2015). Ecosystem disservices too continue to be sidelined in urban forest ecosystem ©2022 International Society of Arboriculture
January 2022
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