Urban Forest Management Plan Toolkit

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Data synthesis and needs assessment

In the preceding assessments, you analyzed the status of your urban forest. Analysis involves breaking down a complex situation into its component parts. In this step, you will put the parts back together to identify issues, trends, and needs.

In the data synthesis, you will pull together the information on what you have and try to determine why. For instance, why is canopy cover decreasing? Perhaps more trees are removed than are planted. But what if planting outpaces removal? It may be that new trees are still too small to offset the canopy lost by the trees they replaced. How will the situation change over time? If small–statured trees (e.g., crape myrtles) have been planted to replace large trees (e.g., coast live oaks), tree canopy cover may not be restored even when new trees reach their mature size.

In the data synthesis step, you will try to determine how the urban forest arrived at its current state. You can also project what the urban forest is likely to look like in the future based on current conditions and practices. You can now identify needs related to the urban forest. One way to organize the data synthesis is to consider the needs related to major urban forestry program areas. These areas are:

Tree and forest needs
Management needs
Community needs

These program areas are not mutually exclusive. Many urban forestry issues combine aspects that involve two or all three of these areas. Potential areas to consider include:

Tree and forest needs – Needs related to the tree resource itself and processes that maintain the forest, including:

species and age diversity
tree planting
protection and maintenance of existing trees
compatibility of species and planting sites

Management needs – Needs of the urban forest program and the people involved with the short– and long–term care and maintenance of the urban forest. Needs might include:

improved ability to schedule and track maintenance
better coordination between departments with respect to tree issues
adequate staffing
employee training
stable source of funding
updated species selection lists or criteria
tree planting standards

Community needs – Needs related to how the public perceives and interacts with the urban forest and the urban forest management program. These may include:

better access to and/or greater use of information related to proper tree selection, placement, planting, and care;
programs to improve tree care in commercial landscapes;
guidelines and ordinances to promote protection of existing trees;
licensing local tree care contractors to improve compliance with approved tree care standards.

When you have completed the data synthesis step, you should have an understanding of why your urban forest is in its current state. Your needs assessment will indicate what is required to either maintain or improve the existing urban forest. In the next step, you will set goals based on your overall vision for the urban forest and the needs you have identified.

The work plan and the outline input sections below are grouped by the main program areas (tree resources, management, community).

- Example
- Planning questions

Shading of commercial parking lots was a particular topic of interest in the development of the City of Rocklin, CA, urban forest plan. The section quoted below shows how several sources of data were synthesized to understand how the current situation had developed. The plan identified needs in this area as well as potential ways to address these needs.

Several factors contribute to low levels of shade in Rocklin parking lots. Many of the surveyed lots simply had too few trees in positions to do the job. Ratios of parking spaces to trees only partially explain the situation. Parking lots can have low numbers of well-shaded spaces for several other reasons:

if many of the trees are planted around edges of the lot, little of the canopy may extend over parking spaces;

trees with small canopies will provide little shading even at relatively high planting densities. Canopy size may be small because trees are young, have been stunted by poor site conditions or improper maintenance, or are simply small–statured at maturity;

if trees are planted densely (mainly in linear planters near buildings or the edges of the lot), canopies can overlap and provide less shade than more widely spaced trees would.

Furthermore, parking spaces typically occupy only a portion of the total paved area of a parking lot. In the best–shaded lot (lot 7, Figures 3.6–3, 3.6–7), about 7% of the spaces were more than half shaded. When driveways and aisles between parking spaces are taken in to account, it is clear that the absolute level of canopy cover over the paved portion of this lot is less than 5%. To increase levels of parking lot shade beyond that seen in the surveyed lots, additional tree planting and design changes are needed to maximize the amount of effective pavement shading provided by trees.

Tree health and maintenance are other factors that influence levels of shade that develop in parking lots. If growing conditions are poor, both new and older trees will remain stunted and will not attain the size anticipated in the approved landscape plan. Tree canopy size can also be restricted by improper pruning practices, such as topping...

Parking lot canopy cover is also adversely affected by premature tree decline and death. Tree death and removal causes an immediate loss of tree canopy. If trees are not replaced, the ratio of parking spaces per tree is increased over the long term. Even if trees are replaced, the new trees are small and typically do not provide significant shade for a number of years. Any program to develop better-shaded parking lots has to include provisions to replace lost trees and monitor the health and maintenance of existing trees.

As currently constructed, parking lots are typically not good sites for tree growth...

These negative features can be mitigated to some degree through design and construction techniques. Increasing planter size and using linear planters can provide greater amounts of rootable soil, but only if the soil is deeply tilled to reduce soil compaction and improve drainage. Irrigation systems must be designed and operated to ensure that applied water does not simply run off. Some areas of impervious pavement can be replaced by pavers or other pervious materials within the rootzone... Some of these improvements, such as decompacting planting beds and making use of permeable paving materials may require some additional costs at the construction phase, but these modest investments will pay off in terms of reduced maintenance, superior tree performance, and more shade-related benefits over the long term. In older lots, efforts to ensure that missing trees are replaced will be more successful if they include soil modifications to improve growing conditions.

Planning for the Future of Rocklin's Urban Forest, 2006, excerpts from p 107-109

Work plan

Use this worksheet to plan and track the synthesis of data gathered in the assessment process.


Include	Needs/action areas	Data synthesis by	Target date	Completed	Edit
1	Tree and forest
1	Tree and forest				save
2	Management
2	Management				save
3	Community interactions
3	Community interactions				save
4					save

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Outline

Add content related to tree and forest needs/action areas:

Add content related to urban forest management needs/action areas:

Add content related to community needs/action areas:

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Urban Forest Management PlanToolkit

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