Please join us for a Joint Seminar with the Eversource Energy Center and Natural Resources and the Environment, featuring Dr. Tenley Coway, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto-Mississauga and the Household-Level Urban Socio-Ecology (HOUSE) Laboratory. She will be presenting on "Seeing the Residents Through the Trees: Residents’ Attitudes and Experiences with the Urban Forest."
Friday, November 18th, 2:30-3:30. WB Young Building Room 100. Light refreshments will be served beginning at 2pm
Dr. Tenley Conway’s seminar will illustrate critical factors in tree-planting decisions after storms. Tenley’s research looks to integrate insights from environmental geography and urban ecology to improve our understanding of the relationship between human activity and the physical environment within the urban landscape. Her research is driven by questions surrounding the ecology of human-dominated landscapes, equitable access to natural amenities, and the efficacy of current management approaches.
Municipalities across North America are investing in their urban forests like never before, primarily due to their potential to provide critical ecosystem services. A basic challenge of urban forest management is that in most cities the majority of trees are located on private property. Thus, residents and other landowners need to be active participants in order to meet management goals associated with ecosystem service provisioning and more generally protect and grow the urban forest. While urban residents typically manage very small properties, the cumulative impacts of their decisions can have substantial effects on urban forests structure and function. This study explored residents’ experiences, attitudes and actions related to trees on their property to better understand fine-scale socio-ecological relationships shaping urban forests. The study conducted written surveys and in-depth interviews with residents in the Greater Toronto Area (Ontario, Canada) to explore (1) property-level tree conditions in relation to household attitudes and socio-demographics; (2) motivations and barriers associated with residents’ tree planting, species selection and tree removal; and (3) residents’ experiences and reactions to a major ice storm that highlighted a set of urban forest disservices. Not surprisingly, residents do not make tree management decisions with ecosystem services in mind. Rather, individual aesthetic preferences, maintenance concerns, and perceived and experienced disservices drove household-level attitudes and actions toward urban trees in this study. The broader urban socio-ecological and urban forest management implications will be discussed.
For more information, contact: Ashley Sandy at ashley.sandy@uconn.edu