108 Kenney et al.: Criteria and Indicators for Strategic Urban Forest Planning and Management Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 2011. 37(3): 108–117 Criteria and Indicators for Strategic Urban Forest Planning and Management W. Andy Kenney, Philip J.E. van Wassenaer, and Alexander L. Satel Abstract. The success of urban forest management is frequently predicated upon achieving absolute canopy cover targets. This two-di- mensional view of the urban forest does not provide a comprehensive assessment of urban forest stewardship in a community and does not account for an area’s potential to support a forest canopy. A comprehensive set of performance-based criteria and indicators con- cerning the community’s vegetation resource, community framework and resource management approach is described. This set of broadly based measures provides a more useful tool for the evaluation of urban forest management success and strategic management planning. Key Words. Canopy Cover; Municipal Planning; Relative Canopy Cover; Sustainability; Urban Forest Planning; Urban Forestry. duction, and stormwater attenuation (McPherson et al. 2005) conclusively demonstrate that trees account for an important part of any community’s infrastructure, providing positive re- turns on investment and tangible benefits to urban residents. Urban forests composed of diverse species and age classes provide a wider range of benefits over the long term, particu- larly if urban trees are large-growing, long-lived specimens. Currently in North America, a common way to describe the The diverse benefits provided by urban forests are well under- stood (Dwyer et al. 1991). Recent efforts to quantify the value of ecological services such as heat-island mitigation, CO2 re- extent of urban forests is to measure the amount of canopy cov- er provided by trees. Canopy cover is essentially a two-dimen- sional measurement of the horizontal surface area of the forest, as seen from a bird’s-eye view. As part of the emerging public policy and scientific dialogue on urban forest management, canopy cover goals have received a great deal of attention as a management target. While canopy cover provides a very sim- ple and intuitive measure of the extent of a community’s urban forest, a much more effective measure of the success of urban forest stewardship rests with moving steadily and aggressively toward a more comprehensive set of performance indicators. This paper discusses some limitations to focusing primarily on canopy cover, and builds on the work of Clark et al. (1997) to describe a more comprehensive set of criteria and performance indicators by which to measure urban forest management suc- cess. It is important to note that the criteria and indicators-based (C&I) urban forest management approach described in this paper can be applied by communities of any size, even with the most limited of budgets. While local circumstances differ, urban for- ests everywhere face similar challenges, from limited community involvement, to invasive species, to inadequate growing spaces, just to name a few. Criteria and indicators provide a standardized set of performance measures that can relate to urban forests any- ©2011 International Society of Arboriculture where and help guide managers to improve the health of their tree resource and the effectiveness of their management approach. Implementing a criteria and indicators-based approach to as- sessing the urban forest and its management need not be a time or resource-consuming undertaking. The majority of criteria can be assessed as a simple collaborative desktop exercise, while others require some data, such as tree inventories or GIS-based mapping. Any criterion which cannot be readily assessed—be it due to a lack of available information, inadequate resources, or other rea- sons—can still serve to highlight opportunities for improvement. As such, it is important that communities utilizing this approach do not simply pick-and-choose certain criteria for assessment, but rather work through the entire set of twenty-five criteria and indicators presented in this paper. The prioritization of each crite- rion can be addressed through the management planning process. Finally, it must be noted that use of the C&I approach is not limited to municipal or other government staff, who are traditionally considered the chief managers of urban for- est resources. Rather, a collaborative approach among mu- nicipal staff, community and stewardship groups, and other stakeholders will invariably result in more accurate and, oftentimes, higher rankings on the assessment scale. A need to modify and update the original criteria and indica- tors developed by Clark et al. (1997) was identified by the authors due to the limited application of the approach to achieving ur- ban forest sustainability. When first published, the paper showed promise by providing objectives that spanned a range of urban forestry issues and enabled managers to focus their efforts and frequently limited budgets. More than a decade later, few urban forest management plans or programs are informed by these cri- teria and indicators, making the tracking of progress difficult and potentially resulting in missed opportunities and misallocation of resources. By expanding the list of criteria and indicators and modifying others to shift the focus towards more easily quantifi-
May 2011
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