Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 38(6): November 2012 Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 2012. 38(6): 293–294 293 BOOK REVIEW Old Growth Urban Forests, Springer Briefs in Ecology. 2011. By Robert E. Loeb. 78 pp. Springer: New York, U.S. ISBN 978-1461405825 In total, this the ecological book develops brief is thought-provoking underpinnings and informative, whether or not one agrees with the premise of the definition as presented. A fine scholarly contribution within limits, forest dynamics and ecological approaches for urban canopy systems and associated urban vegetation The author develops a concept of the old growth urban forest in three major sections. After introducing the topic and developing a workable definition for the old growth urban forest in the first section, the second section employs a series of studies to compare New York City, New York, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., as nodes of a megalopolis that fall within a common forest region. The comparison is used to explore historical ecology methods to develop and discuss aspects of forest dynamics within an urban context. The third section presents the argument for the conservation and restoration of old growth urban forest areas of merit through adaptive management and community partnerships. There is no formal definition posited for the urban forest or for the old growth urban forest. Rather, there are short background sections that discuss aspects of each word or phrase. There are major assumptions made about, and limitations imposed upon, the subject, which must be accepted, or at least allowed, for the purpose of getting the value from the text. According to the text, if the current tree community has fidelity with the pre-development (or previous to a post-development major disturbance) canopy species with a percentage of large trees, the litmus test for designation as “old growth” has been passed. There also has to be some definition of urbanity for that the author chooses a metropolis. With the choice of a metropolis as the defining unit, the author can move into suburban and adjacent lands within his treatment of forest typologies at a regional scale, but it limits what community canopies fall into the term “urban forest.” The author assigns typologies of street, landscape, and remnant within the larger urban forest definition. Defining the forest in this text relies on the arboreal community to the exclusion of other vegetation types within the defined system, which hampers extension into a larger forest ecological context. The use of a resetting event for the vegetation community, chosen as a consequence of a development process, also begs some indulgence when dealing with some metropolis systems. For example, the use of the Miami, Florida, U.S., metropolis in remnant old growth urban forest research can identify a major development or re-setting event in the city expansion of the late 1890s or in a major hurricane several years later. In either case, old growth status could be conferred within a single tree for interpreting management. lifespan or community generation. This juxtaposition between the concept of old growth, its definition for an urban context, and the marked rapid expansion of urban systems might suggest that there is room for revision and improvement in the definition of old growth in terms of the urban forest. The definition demands a canopy species distribution and some aspects of size distribution that reflect the pre-development plant community or a level of existing stock maturity. Simple repetition of species occurrence does not mark old growth as much as consumer behaviors in many cases. Maturity by trunk size, as used in the text, is difficult to gauge when trees (particularly among inner city areas) do not necessarily reach maturity or natural cohort senescence prior to redevelopment or decline. Interpretation of size in relation to designed site types is also largely undefined to anchor the concept of maturity by size. Forty years of a species lifespan capable of centuries of growth might be considered successful, but not old in the context of the discussion. If an observed forty- year specimen is of the same species as had been used in three previous plantings, chosen out of market access or tradition, it would trace back to the start of the industrial revolution and rapid urban design changes. Such occurrences can define continuity, but not what might be ascribed to an old growth forest trajectory in a larger discussion of ecological value or function. The second section of the book deals with analysis methods for concept development. The author introduces a sequence of inquiry that relies heavily on paleopalynology (the analysis of the pollen record), compared with records of the historic flora and witness tree records (specific trees or groups identified by species in historic documentation). The author points out the challenges in their integration and verification through a discussion of “methodological actualism versus methodological uniformitarianism.” The point made by the author: Data over decades and centuries as part of a public record are rarely set for formal analysis. The data are not always reliable. Our taxonomy is a dynamic classification process (assuming the use of the correct identifications). Finally, methods of measure and collection are far from standardized over multiple decades/centuries. These confounding factors force conclusions to be rather broad, but can inform discussions of urban forest canopy dynamics. While the text presents a sound approach with pollen and historic records, the use of a burgeoning resource of data through geo-spatial analysis and interpretation is largely ignored. Digital inventories are becoming commonplace and can be effectively used in the comparison of historic documentation and published flora compilations against the disturbance and recruitment filter that is the urban landscape design and redevelopment process. These tools are shown in the application of conservation efforts detailed in the book’s third section, and will certainly augment the approaches and perspectives laid out for the reader. ©2012 International Society of Arboriculture
November 2012
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