Urban Forest Management Plan
Toolkit

Park trees include trees in public parks maintained by cities, counties, parks districts, and the like. Park–like sites may also exist in other sites such as open areas of campuses, botanical gardens, and other private or public locations.

On this page we consider trees in landscaped park settings. Trees in natural areas are considered under open space trees. However, these categories may overlap. For instance, landscaped parks may include remnant native trees along creeks, hillsides, or other areas that are left in a natural state. Park trees may also overlap with facility trees in situations where trees are located near structures in parks. Parks may also contain street trees along their edges. These may be managed separately from other park trees.

Because park trees are more freely arranged than trees along streets, inventories can be more difficult to conduct. Tree locations need to be tied to site plans or mapped in a GIS system. You can use sample surveys to gather data if you lack an inventory.

Compared with street or facility trees, park trees have fewer space constraints for both canopies and roots. This can allow the use of a wider range of species and larger trees overall. However, tree care may not receive high priority where turf or sports fields are primary uses. Crews that maintain lawns may not have adequate training to recognize and address tree maintenance issues. Other considerations:

You may want to consider these or other factors in the assessment. Some park sites are unique. For such sites, the assessment and analysis should address site-specific needs. In other cases, parks of similar age may be similar in makeup and management and can be considered as a group. For initial data collection, you may only need to do sample surveys of representative parks in each group.