Department of Environmental Conservation’s

Spring 2011 Seminar Series

Room 305 Holdsworth Hall

 

 

“Assessing Ecosystem Services and Values from Tress” – David Nowak – USDA Forest Service, Northern Research station

For information about Dave, visit: http://nrs.fs.fed.us/people/dnowak

Seminar Abstract:

To help with improving the management, planning and policies related to urban forests it is important to have accurate assessments of the urban forest structure and its associated ecosystem services (e.g., pollution removal, effects on atmospheric carbon, altering of building energy use, air temperature reduction, reductions in stream flow) and values at the local to national scale. To this end, numerous projects in the United States have assessed national and local urban forests from both top-down aerial-based approaches and bottom-up field data collection approaches. To help users assess their local urban forest at any scale, various tools have been and are currently being developed that integrate these two approaches to help assess current urban forest conditions, but also project how current actions will affect future conditions and values. Many of these tools are being distributed freely through a public-domain software known as i-Tree (www.itreetools.org).  This presentation will discuss the various methods being used to assess urban forests and the existing and new tools that are being developed to aid managers.