Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 42(6): November 2016 The benefits of tree maintenance could include greater service life of the tree and an increase in its associated ecosystem benefits, decreased tree limb breakage and storm cleanup in the future, or enhanced tree longevity and a reduction in urban forest removal and plant- ing costs. The fundamental question with any of these practices is whether the marginal ben- efit resulting from the maintenance exceeds the marginal cost. The accounting of benefits and costs can involve many variables, each of which require itemization and price assign- ment over a common time period and ideally consider the changing value of money over time. After this is all considered, a decision could be made that the benefits exceeds the costs (or not), using one of several evaluation mechanisms, such as net benefit (benefits minus costs, annualized or cumulative), net pres- ent value (sum of discounted benefits minus discounted costs), benefit–cost ratio (benefits divided by costs), internal rate of return (the discounted interest rate when net present value = 0), or other approach (Miller et al. 2015). 383 collected and the time frame required. Discipline and organization are required when keeping and tracking cost information over time. Once col- lected, the data must be analyzed appropriately to quantify costs and benefits. This can quickly become a complicated undertaking. Standardiz- ing maintenance definitions, practices, and data collection activities is also important. Simply reporting that a tree was pruned does not con- vey how the tree was pruned, the intensity of pruning, the pruning objectives, who performed the work, and the price (i.e., cost) of the work. Further, accounting for the benefits of trees during their life cycle is complex. The market- place gives the value of what a person is willing to pay for something. This could be something tangible, like a pruning services, or something more subjective, like the value a person places on a tree as part of their quality of life. Where a marketplace of buyers and sellers does not exist, data gatherers can use other methodological approaches as surrogates to place value on assets. Examples of such methods include those that use hedonic pricing to determine the monetary Figure 3. Key components of urban tree maintenance periodicity and factors that potentially influence tree growth and longevity and urban forest structure. In theory, documenting the benefits and costs of the urban forest is merely an accounting and financial exercise. In practice, tracking every cost requires defining what information needs to be impact of a tree on property values, the eco- logical and societal benefits of trees (e.g., using software such as i-Tree), or deriving a compen- satory value of a tree using a formula [e.g., such ©2016 International Society of Arboriculture
November 2016
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