Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 44(2): March 2018 Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 2018. 44(2):41–48 41 Civic Science in Urban Forestry: An Introduction Lara A. Roman, Lindsay K. Campbell, and Rebecca C. Jordan Abstract. Civic science in urban forestry is a means of engaging the public in the study, management, and care of urban trees, and includes varied approaches with different disciplinary foundations. For instance, citizen science has been gaining prominence in urban forestry, with municipalities and nonprofits engaging volunteers in data collection for inventories and monitoring. Residents can also get involved in other stages of urban forest research and management, including framing goals and questions, conduct- ing analyses, interpreting data, and applying results. Diverse forms of public engagement have brought expanded stakeholders into the fold of knowledge production and stewardship of urban greenspaces, including co-management and civic ecology practices. As municipalities, states, nonprofits, and scientists undertake these various forms of civic science, there is a need for basic research about the nature of civic engagement in urban forestry, empirical evidence about best practices for different approaches, and the impacts of volunteering on the participants themselves. This special issue of Arboriculture & Urban Forestry aims to advance the scholarship of civic science in urban forestry by addressing these topics, among others, with contributed articles. In this introduc- tion to the special issue, we briefly review terms related to civic science to connect these interrelated bodies of inquiry to urban for- estry, and present the research studies and practitioner notes included in this special issue. We then conclude with a discussion of future research needs for civic science in urban forestry, including technological tools to enable data democratization, engaging mar- ginalized and under-represented urban communities, and supporting transdisciplinary exchanges between research and practice. Key Words. Citizen Science; Civic Ecology; Co-Management; Knowledge Co-Production; Participatory Research; Urban Ecology; Urban Forestry. This special issue grew from a symposium enti- tled “Citizen Science & Urban Forestry: Research & Practice,” held in May 2016 and hosted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service Philadelphia Field Station and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Presentation topics spanned participant learning, civic ecology practices, technologies for citizen science, data quality considerations, and the practical applica- tion of citizen science to urban forest manage- ment. Presenters and attendees included research scientists, public land managers, nonprofit leaders, and civic stewards—reflecting the broad interest in applied research and adaptive management ap- proaches to advance the practice of urban forestry. The development of the symposium was inspired by the sense that while citizen science has recently been applied to a wide range of urban forest man- agement needs—including street tree inventories (Kocher 2012; Campbell 2015; DiSalvo et al. 2017), tree survival monitoring (Roman et al. 2013), and detection of invasive plants and diseases (Haw- thorne et al. 2015; Meetenmeyer et al. 2015)—it has not yet received much attention in the schol- arly literature, with the exception of a few stud- ies of volunteer data quality (Bloniarz and Ryan 1996; Cozad 2005; Roman et al. 2017). There is, however, an extensive body of literature on citizen science in other ecological systems, such as public parklands and coastal aquatic communities, and taxonomic groups such as birds, butterflies, frogs, and plants (Bonney et al. 2009; Dickinson et al. 2010; Dickinson et al. 2012; Tulloch et al. 2013). Meanwhile, urban forestry researchers have been exploring other aspects of civic engagement, in- cluding how diverse stakeholders are networked in the stewardship of urban greenspaces and manage- ment of ecosystem services (Connolly et al. 2014), participatory urban forest planning (Van Herzele et al. 2005; Janse and Konijnendijk 2007), stew- ardship outcomes monitoring (Silva and Krasny 2014), and knowledge co-production (Camp- bell et al. 2016). We initiated this special issue to advance a broader awareness and understanding of ©2018 International Society of Arboriculture
March 2018
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