Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
(N/A)
ANN ARBOR,MI 48109
Performing Department
School for Environment and Sustainability
Non Technical Summary
Urban forests are widely recognized for their positive contributions to the environment, and aesthetic benefits for people, directly impacting the health and well-being of urban residents. Urban forests not only provide shade and cooling effects in summer and wind protection in winter, they also play an important role in a community's ability to respond and recover from extreme weather events. Decisions about what types of trees plant and their arrangement is an important step in the process of urban reforestation, and can play a large role in the success and sustainability of these initiatives.Despite the fact that many people agree on the importance of urban forests, tree cover in U.S. cities has been in decline (an estimated 7900 hectares or 4.0 million trees per year). In addition, while there are many efforts underway to establish new urban forests, , particularly on abandoned vacant land, more effort should be made to involve local residents in these efforts. In particular, there is a recognized need to provide opportunities for meaningful involvement by citizens in all steps of decisions and planning related to urban reforestation. This process will require an interactive and user-friendly decision-making process that can more effectively incorporate community needs with the protection of natural areas in urban centers.As it is important to identify the specific needs and goals of the community, opportunities for collaboration and engagement with community members to specify the ecosystem servicesgoals that are important and meaningful to them must be a part of any urban forest planning and management initiative. However, existing processes to identify these goals can be costly and time consuming, and thus may not be appropriate in all settings. Our research seeks to improve public engagement for urban forest restoration and management through the use of a video game-based decision-support tool that provides a three-dimensional representation of forests and other urban greenspaces, and which also explicitly incorporates decision-relevant forest attributes. These attributes have been identified in our previous work with residents and the general public, and we aim to refine and extend these with input from practitioners to evaluate if they are relevant in other contexts with different stakeholders. We ultimately aim to supply insights to urban forest managers, and to interested individuals and organizations, to inform the long-term social and ecological sustainability of urban forests.
Animal Health Component
(N/A)
Research Effort Categories
Basic
100%
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
Urban forests provide important ecosystem services that play a large role in the health and well-being of communities while offering opportunities to connect with nature in cities (Carrus, Dadvand, & Sanesi, 2017; Standish, Hobbs, & Miller, 2013). As part of wider goals for urban resilience, many city planners are increasingly aiming to develop and enhance urban forests and tree cover (e.g. restoring urban forest habitats and reforesting vacant lots) (Elmqvist et al., 2015). However, there are a number of barriers that impede the full acceptance and potential of urban forests by residents including: 1) distrust in city governments, 2) lack of buy-in for recommendations from planners and consultants, and 3) acute concerns about personal safety and the spillover of crime to neighborhoods adjacent to urban greenspaces (Soto, Escobedo, Khachatryan, & Adams, 2018; Weber, Boley, Palardy, & Gaither, 2017). These are examples of unintended negative consequence of traditional top-down approaches that ignore and exclude community voices in the planning and management of urban forests (Carmichael & McDonough, 2018). Unintended consequences have been compounded by a lack of acknowledgement and acceptance by forestry and planning professionals of cultural ecosystem services, emotional connection, and local food production activities associated with urban forests (McLain, Poe, Hurley, Lecompte-Mastenbrook, & Emery, 2012; Van Berkel & Verburg, 2014).One example of a way to more fully engage residents and their values in community-based ecosystem management is technology-based interactive Decision Support Tools (DST). Serious gaming, tangible landscapes, participatory GIS and immersive environments are all promising examples of tools that encourage stakeholder communication and stimulate knowledge discovery based on interactive feedback. A highly relevant interactive urban forestry DST is Land.info (land.info http://tiny.cc/u3d-dss) (Lindquist, Campbell-Arvai, Deaton, & Maxim, 2020). Land.info uses video game technology and 3D visualization to place users in their community and casts them in the role of urban forest designer, allowing them to create urban forestry and park infrastructure in virtual city spaces. As users design they receive real-time feedback based on their decisions - e.g cost of trees, rainwater storage - that enables truly interactive multicriteria evaluation of their decision-making (Bishop, Stock, & Williams, 2009). While Land.info and other DSTs are often seen as highly relevant for co-production of forests and other greenspace, there is scarce evaluation of their efficacy (Hilde & Paterson, 2014; Nesbitt, Hotte, Barron, Cowan, & Sheppard, 2017). The research proposed here aims to 'scale up' the Land.info software using input from practitioners and will evaluate its effectiveness in real-world urban forestry workshops with practitioners and residents. We propose an integrative science initiative that engages urban forestry practitioners and stakeholders in Detroit and New Orleans using Land.info in the co-production of community based urban forests. Lack of tree cover in both cities has led to increased stormwater runoff and decreased air and water quality while compounding the urban heat island effect (Akbari, Pomerantz, & Taha, 2001). While there are numerous efforts underway to establish new urban forests and to simultaneously address the problem of vacant land (e.g. Schilling & Logan, 2008), there is a lack of easy-to-use scalable tools that can more fully engage practitioners and residents in co-production processes (Lovell & Taylor, 2013).
Project Methods
Year 1: UM-Practitioner Co-productionIn Year 1 we will conduct pre-workshop interviews with urban forestry practitioners in Detroit and New Orleans to identify an initial list of factors that inform their urban forest management/tree planting efforts (i.e., ecosystem services, costs, species characteristics), and to recruit participants for the practitioner workshops.Informed by the interviews, co-production workshops will be conducted with practitioners to support the configuration of Land.info based on their needs and expectations. In particular we will be probing for information on the forest attributes and functions to be included in (or omitted from) our existing DST, and why, using a think-aloud protocol (Ericsson & Simon, 1993; Kuusela & Paul, 2009) to gain a deeper understanding of participants' rationale and decision-making. Workshops will be audio-recorded, transcribed and analyzed using inductive qualitative analysis (Thomas, 2006) to identify emergent themes and insights associated with the use of Land.info. A complementary quantitative survey of workshop participants will measure outcome variables of satisfaction with, attitude towards and intention of using Land.info in their work. We will also include pre- and post-workshop survey questions to assess changes in awareness of and attitudes towards the multifunctionality of forested urban greenspace, and in particular participants' familiarity with common cultural ecosystem services and relational values associated with urban forests and trees.An online survey, distributed to a broader cross-section of urban greenspace practitioners and professionals, will experimentally test outcomes associated with the inclusion of instrumental (e.g., costs and economic benefits), intrinsic (e.g. cultural values, aesthetics), and relational values (e.g., sense of place) in the Land.info DST. We will measure changes in attitudes towards the DST as influenced by the inclusion of these different sets of attributes, intention to include different types of values in urban forest decision-making and management, satisfaction with resultant urban forest management and tree planting plans, and information needs with respect to the inclusion of relational values and cultural services for future work in communities (and for inclusion in supporting educational materials).Year 2: Practitioner-Community Co-production In Year 2, we will develop a training manual and conduct initial Land.info training session with practitioners followed by workshops that bring together community members and stakeholders with practitioners. The workshops will provide a robust test of our hypotheses related to practitioner confidence/self-efficacy in the collaborative use of Land.info in partnership with communities and stakeholders, community and practitioner satisfaction with the process and resultant forest management/tree planting scenarios, as well as community trust and confidence in the process. Following the workshops participants will evaluate the resultant forest management plans and/or tree planting scenarios in terms of how well the plans: 1) meet community-identified objectives; 2) accommodate desired community uses of the forest; and 3) accommodate community expectations (i.e., aesthetics, care, services, values). Ultimately, we will determine if using Land.info improves public engagement in urban forest management/urban tree planting.