Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 42(2): March 2016 aging tree planting and maintenance where the private citizenry may be less motivated to do so. Past research has suggested that tree planting is less common on renter-occupied property because absentee property owners (who do not occupy the home) and renters (who do not own the property and may move away before ben- efits are realized) are both less motivated to plant trees than owner occupants (Perkins et al. 2004). By promoting publicly maintained trees, TCUSA potentially compensates in part for reduced tree planting on private property in communities with low owner occupancy rates. Education (high school graduation rate) and per- cent white population were positively associated with TCUSA participation in seven and five U.S. regions, respectively (Table 3). Past research has identified instances in which tree canopy cover was distrib- uted unequally according to education (Heynen and Lindsey 2003) and race (Landry and Chakraborty 2009). It is possible that uneven participation in TCUSA will perpetuate such inequalities in canopy cover because TCUSA requires active management and funding of community forestry programs. More broadly, if one assumes that TCUSA delivers on its goals to yield social, economic, and environmental advantages for participant communities (Arbor Day Foundation 2014), then reduced participation rates in communities with lower education levels or higher minority populations may signal regional- scale patterns of environmental injustice [for recent articles on environmental justice in the context of urban forestry, see Berland et al. (2015) and Schwarz et al. (2015)]. In other words, residents of commu- nities with lower educational attainment or higher minority populations may not have equal access to the advantages provided by TCUSA. More informa- tion on the realized benefits of TCUSA participation (as opposed to expected or anecdotal benefits) is needed to more fully address this issue. Additional research is needed to understand why these patterns are restricted to certain regions, and why municipal leaders do not pursue TCUSA status in communi- ties with lower educational attainment or higher minority populations. For example, is this pattern driven by scarce municipal resources, prioritiza- tion of other programming instead of community forestry, or is it attributable to a lack of program awareness, perceived benefits, or citizen interest? 127 The Geography of TCUSA Participation TCUSA participation rates varied substantially among U.S. regions. The clearest national pattern was relatively low participation in the northeastern U.S. and high participation in the Midwest (compare Figure 1 and Table 1). Other patterns were less con- sistent. For instance, in the western U.S., participa- tion rates were high in the Mountain region but low in the Pacific region (Table 1). The authors are unable to explain the variability in TCUSA participation rates among regions, but it is clear that opportuni- ties exist to increase participation rates in all regions, and particularly in New England, Middle Atlantic, West South Central, and Pacific regions (Table 1). Strategies to increase TCUSA participation likely need to be devised at regional or finer scales, because each region has unique population (Table 2; Figure 3) and socioeconomic (Table 3) profiles with respect to participation. For example, Middle Atlantic communities around 96,000 population have even odds of participating in TCUSA, whereas West North Central communities larger than 10,000 population are already more likely than not to participate (Table 2; Figure 3). As such, while it may be worthwhile to target Middle Atlantic com- munities around 100,000 population as new enroll- ees, participation may already be near saturation for larger communities in the West North Central, and efforts there may instead target smaller com- munities under 10,000 population. To improve the chances of success, efforts to increase partici- pation in these two disparate regions would need to account for differences in institutional capaci- ties between larger and smaller government units on top of other regional predilections. In light of regional differences, it may be appropriate to orga- nize support for community forestry programs like TCUSA at the state level, perhaps through exist- ing organizations (e.g., relevant state agencies or extension offices). State-level efforts would cast a relatively wide net while allowing for efforts to be tailored to the unique characteristics of each state. Positive spatial autocorrelation in program participation suggests that communities are more likely to enroll in TCUSA if neighboring com- munities participate. This pattern could emerge spontaneously due to spatial clustering of com- munities with demographic profiles amenable to TCUSA participation (e.g., lower owner occu- ©2016 International Society of Arboriculture
March 2016
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