©2023 International Society of Arboriculture 284 Parajuli et al: COVID-19 Impacts on Private-Sector Urban and Community Forestry economic surveys, reported that there was a dip in overall business sales and shipments in 2020 due pri- marily to the pandemic, but by the end of fourth quar- ter of 2021, the economic indicators in the U.S. fully recovered to the pre-pandemic level. With the prospects of increased potential for fur- ther pandemic events in the future (Grima et al. 2020), understanding the organizational capacity to carry out U&CF activities—including the prevalent work of private-sector U&CF businesses—is necessary for provision of urban forest ecosystem services and urban forestry policy going forward. The entrepre- neurship that comes with small businesses is key in community rebound after disasters (Storr et al. 2015), such that understanding how small businesses per- ceive the impacts after a pandemic shock, and how it relates to challenges they face, may be informative of their ability to deal with pandemic shocks and to help communities recover. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the per- ceived impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on pri- vate businesses carrying out U&CF activities in the Southern USA using data collected through an online survey in 2021. We were specifically interested in the private businesses involved in U&CF in the region, since they play a large role in implementing U&CF across the region’s predominantly private urban for- estlands. In this paper, we relate the perceived impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic to the challenges faced by these businesses as well as to characteristics of the businesses in an attempt to understand how U&CF policies may prepare the private sector for future pan- demic and economic shocks, such that it continues to provide the services for human wellbeing and the overall environment in urban areas in times of distress. Besides Marwah et al. (2021), who looked at the impacts of COVID-19 on the broader green industry using a small sample from Texas, this is the only study, to the best of our knowledge, that investigates the impacts of COVID-19 on the private-sector U&CF industry, which is likely due to the low avail- ability of sector-wide data, in general, and around COVID-19, specifically. Moreover, most of the stud- ies looking at urban forests and COVID-19 have focused on the importance of access to urban green spaces during that time and at the equity issues sur- rounding it (Ugolini et al. 2020; Venter et al. 2020; Poortinga et al. 2021; Ugolini et al. 2021; Marconi et and mental health (O’Brien et al. 2022). A recent and thorough review of ecological and human benefits of urban forests is presented in O’Brien et al. (2022). Besides the additional hedonic values to the adjacent properties, it has been estimated that urban forests provide external benefits in the order of $73 billion to the national economy in the USA, and that the urban forestry sector contributes $64 billion in economic benefits (Thompson et al. 2021). The planning, establishment, and management of urban forests entail a series of activities that are car- ried out by public and private stakeholders which, together, comprise the U&CF sector, the ultimate providers of urban forest ecosystem services to soci- ety. Public stakeholders comprise federal, state, and local government agencies dictating urban and com- munity forestry policies and guidelines to be imple- mented in publicly owned spaces, as well as universities that undertake the research and generate the knowledge to inform such policies and guidelines (Parajuli et al. 2022). This knowledge also guides the private actors carrying out tree care and urban canopy management, such as non-profit organizations and urban forestry professionals (consulting foresters, commercial arborists, landscape contractors, among others), in a landscape that is predominantly privately owned such as residential yards, woodlots, corporate parks, and industrial sites (Miller et al. 2015). The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant, yet heterogeneous, overall impacts on businesses, the workforce, and therefore, on consumer spending throughout the US (Chetty et al. 2020; Padhan and Prabheesh 2021; Roman et al. 2022). In an early assessment, Chetty et al. (2020) showed that, despite a 67% reduction in total consumer spending due to the COVID-19 shock, there was a slight increase in seasonally adjusted consumer spending on luxury services that do not require contact as opposed to demand for services and goods that required contact (such as the food and accommodation services). Moreover, they suggested that the main driver of residual decline in spending on non-interaction ser- vices was the trickle-down effect related to the ability of businesses to supply such services—a factor that may be more prominent among small businesses that have lower ability to find substitutes for scarce resources, such as labor and inputs, across sectors and a restricted geographical area (Yagan 2019). Roman et al. (2022), based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s
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