Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 44(2): March 2018 Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 2018. 44(2):49–58 49 Every Tree Counts: Reflections on NYC’s Third Volunteer Street Tree Inventory Crystal A. Crown, Benjamin Z. Greer, Danielle M. Gift, and Fiona S. Watt Abstract. TreesCount! 2015 (TC2015) was the third citizen-participatory inventory of street trees in New York City, New York, U.S. Every ten years, the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation has worked with citizen scientists to record the location, size, species, and condition of all public curbside trees. Volunteer street tree inventories promote awareness of the importance of the urban forest and support municipal urban forest management. New York City’s prior street tree inventories in 1995 and 2005 led to advances in customer service, funding for routine street tree pruning, and urban greening initiatives. TC2015 attracted 2,241 volun- tary participants through multiple recruitment efforts, more than doubling involvement from 2005. Fully digital data collection improved data quality and facilitated near-real-time quality assurance of data, and advanced tree location methods increased spa- tial data accuracy from past inventories. Data-collection events and reward strategies were also implemented to promote volunteer engagement. Citizen scientists collected tree location data with a high-level of accuracy (96.1%) aſter minimal training. All 666,134 street trees surveyed in TC2015 populated NYC Parks’s operational forestry database, as well as a public facing map (NYC Street Tree Map) for tree stewards. The following paper describes TC2015 project design and execution, outlines some of the key changes made since the first inventory in 1995, and provides results-based recommendations for practitioners planning similar projects. Key Words: Citizen Science; Civic Science; Data Quality; NYC; Street Tree Inventory. TreesCount! 2015 (TC2015) was the third decadal street tree inventory and the largest citizen- science project ever undertaken by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation (NYC Parks). Like its predecessors, which began in 1995 and 2005, TC2015 spanned two years, be- ginning in May 2015 and finishing in October 2016. The goal of all three inventories was to en- gage citizens in inventorying NYC’s street trees to facilitate management and stewardship of this natural resource. TC2015 differed from the two prior inventories with its greater spatial accu- racy, citizen-scientist engagement, and inclusion of fewer but more operationally useful variables. TC2015 yielded a spatially accurate database of NYC’s street trees that has been incorpo- rated into NYC Parks’s daily operations. These data are also shared with the public through the NYC Street Tree Map (NYC Parks 2017), an interactive web application that displays tree location, species, and size, and allows stewards to record and track their tree care activities and report problems, thus creating a dialogue with city foresters. NYC Parks updates this map daily from its forestry management sys- tem. The TC2015 data set has also been made available on the NYC OpenData portal (2017). TC2015 engaged over 2,000 citizen scien- tists, many of whom had no prior involvement with NYC Parks. These participants contrib- uted data for 225,595 of the total 666,134 street trees inventoried. The remaining data were collected by NYC Parks staff with assis- tance from the Student Conservation Associa- tion. The following article discusses TC2015 recruitment, training, and reward strategies; variable selection; and data collection method- ology, with an overview of the major successes and lessons learned from working with citizen scientists on a project of this size and scope. ©2018 International Society of Arboriculture
March 2018
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