Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 41(5): September 2015 Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 2015. 41(5): 233–244 233 Street Tree Inventory of Campinas, Brazil: An Instrument for Urban Forestry Management and Planning Ivan André Alvarez, Bruna Cristina Gallo, Edlene Aparecida Monteiro Garçon, and Osvaldo Tadatomo Oshiro Abstract. Campinas Metropolitan Region is the third richest city in Brazil. This study assesses the urban street trees of Campi- nas based on data from a survey performed using satellite images in the year 2011. All public domain trees in the street sys- tem were counted and separated into trees, shrubs, palm trees, and seedlings. The density of trees was obtained using the images census and expressed as trees per linear kilometer for the perimeter of the block. The number of trees per linear kilometer was grouped into nine classes of different densities for data validation. The final number of trees was estimated based on the valida- tion’s results. The Gini coefficient shows that the number of trees per person is very irregular in city neighborhoods (i.e., Campinas has a fairer income distribution than street trees distribution). There is a lower density of trees in the downtown area, due to the high concentration of population, and in more peripheral neighborhoods, due to the lack of design planning. The results obtained here may be used to support a new setting of local priorities for planting actions aimed at urban forestry management. Key Words. Brazil; Campinas; Census; Density; Geoprocessing; Gini Coefficient; Remote Sensing; Street Trees; Urban Ecology; Urban Forest. The challenge of planning urban greenspaces is to quantify them and relate them to other variables of interest to human welfare (Gong et al. 2011). Such in- formation can be useful for sustainable action plans for the management of greenspaces, their expan- sion to currently empty sites, and for the preserva- tion of animal and plant biodiversity (Alvarez 2004). Street trees are part of the urban forest and should be evaluated in terms of their benefits: importance for the maintenance of native animal and plant biodiversity, climate comfort, and run- off interception, among others (Gong et al. 2013). Studies on urban forests in Campinas, Brazil, have been aimed only at fragments of native forests (Santin 1999; Cielo Filho and Santin 2002; Gomes et al. 2005). Although urban forest inventories are an important aid to municipal administration planning, there is only one neighborhood street tree inventory (Aguirre 2008), and none refers to the City of Campinas as a whole. In a situation where there is a large gap of overall information about the urban trees, a quantitative survey would be the start- ing point for gathering reliable information. Wood (1999) specified three types of inventory: field surveys, sample surveys, and computerized- system surveys. The amount of data collected defines the costs of tree inventories, which are divided in quantitative and qualitative inventories. Tree inventory surveys are a form of support- ing governmental plans. A thorough inventory of trees is extremely difficult to make in the field. For an easier inventory, it is possible to use remote-sensing and geoprocessing tools, which are faster and have a better cost–benefit ratios, creating opportunities for exploration and scien- tific knowledge, environmental and social analysis. Alvarez et al. (2010) used digital data from remote sensors (videography and photography techniques) to identify the plant-cover rate of a neighborhood in Piracicaba (São Paulo State, Brazil), obtaining some indexes for the collection of biophysical information about the plants: 1) index of vegetation cover in urban areas (ICVAU) and 2) green index ©2015 International Society of Arboriculture
September 2015
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