DAVIS, Calif. – Forest issues in urban areas increasingly are at the forefront of discussions among Forest Service partners.  Those issues are particularly important in light of their implications for contributing in disparate ways to fulfilling the agency’s role in implementing the Energy Policy Act of 2005.  The management of urban and community forests helps the nation explore alternative sources of energy, even as it encourages cities, counties and states to maximize their benefits from such forests, to save energy, to reduce air pollution and improve air quality, to control storm water runoff and improve hydrology, to increase property values, and to contribute to reducing domestic violence.

In the following conversation, James Geiger, Director of Communications at the Center for Urban Forest Research at the USDA Forest Service, Davis, charts the current landscape for urban forestry and maps out the future role of governments and nonprofit agencies in maximizing the benefits of our forests to our cities. 

   Q: This center is valued—perhaps revered—for the                          essential knowledge and the practices in urban
                         forestry that it transfers to its key publics.  What,
                         specifically, is that knowledge? 

We want people to understand the magnitude and the extent of the benefits that trees provide to communities. Specifically, we want people to know that trees conserve energy, reduce air pollution and carbon dioxide, control storm water runoff, and increase property values. 

And what are some of the tools you use in knowledge transfer?

Such tools include ecoSmart Design Software, a Web-based software program designed to evaluate the tradeoffs of tree placement for energy, storm water, and fire.  Another is canopy assessments that allow communities to obtain accurate measures of the benefits of their current canopy and predict the benefits their canopy will have, given different planting and removal scenarios.

Others are air quality estimates, community tree guides, and our model, the Street Tree Resource Tool for Urban Forest Mangers (STRATUM).

And how is the transfer of practices in urban forestry accomplished?

In other words, how do we do what we do?  The first thing we need to understand is that the primary audience is the state urban forestry coordinators.  By distributing new technology to state coordinators, with the intent that they pass it along through their networks, we "automatically" tap into their network, and on it goes, because each of those clients has their own network. This is how we multiply the distribution of information.

We then have the secondary audiences of state foresters; the Washington Office and research staff; landscape professionals; and all the major nonprofit organizations, e.g., the National Arbor Day Foundation, the Sacramento Tree Foundation, and American Forests.

We’ve always had limited budgets, and so we try to find a way to get things to our audience that would be useful and yet inexpensive.  Initially, we had a hardcopy newsletter, but as our readership expanded it became too expensive to send that out.  We had research summaries that were printed in full color—everything became too expensive.  We went all-electronic.  Our Web site, of course, has all those documents.

If we have a special need, then we produce a publication ourselves and take it to a local printer for multiple copies.  We do that as we need them, but we don’t distribute them worldwide as hard copy.

The interesting thing is that as we develop our Web site, we receive more and more requests for information that we can easily refer to on our Web site.  So it’s become a good place to house things—it’s a kind of library of information with an easy access.

In addition to the newsletters, we have research summaries and news briefs, which are one- or two-page summaries of current things that happen between issues of our newsletter and we place them in our e-mail alert.  We also have on our Web site fact sheets, PowerPoint slides, speeches, briefings, and information on networking by which we encourage people to distribute our materials.

Another thing to remember about our distribution mechanism is that people have different learning styles.  Therefore, we communicate the same message in various formats.  So, our newsletters, research summaries and speeches all may say the same thing, but they are presented in a different way.  We try to get the same message out there in at least three different formats.

Other than using networks and others transfer mechanisms to maintain your relationships with your stakeholders, what other things do you engage in to relate to your audiences?

The noteworthy point here is that because our tech transfer is severely limited by lack of staff and money, we have concentrated our efforts and outreach on the highest level customers, namely, those customers that have the widest reaching networks like statewide coordinators and statewide or national NGOs. 

Forest Service scientists and researchers have been in the forefront of modeling the values and benefits of the urban forest.  What role does the center play in developing tools that communities use to quantify the ecosystem services their trees and forests provide?

Our STRATUM model, a part of the umbrella i-Tree model, allows people to take a small sample of their street trees and run it through the model and they can get an evaluation of the benefits of those street trees.  In combination with the i-Tree it can enable them to get an evaluation of their entire urban forest.  STRATUM provides simple quantitative dollar value of annual environmental and aesthetic benefits: energy conservation, air quality improvement, CO₂ reduction, storm water control, and property value increase.

One of the challenges of urban forestry—at least from the Forest Service perspective—is managerial; that is, serious concerns by management about limited public knowledge about urban and community forestry.  How is this center specifically responding to that concern?

Quite frankly, I disagree with that assessment.  I believe that there is a greater percentage of the U.S. population that is knowledgeable about urban forests than about our national forestlands.  This is not to say that we don’t have a long way to go in terms of educating urban residents on the benefits of urban forests, but based on the vast number of community tree groups that are flourishing today, compared to 25 years ago, we have come a long way in getting the message to the public.  What our center has done in this regard is target these tree groups with our material and messages, to keep them and their constituents abreast of the latest developments in urban forest research.

We both know that urban and community forestry (U&CF) research has identified major issues—namely, statutory, regulatory, and administrative—that inhibit the effective transfer of technology to publics in northern California.  What, specifically, are some of those issues—and how does your center address them?

The major issue by far is lack of dollars.  This has seriously hindered the efficient and effective delivery of our Center’s tech transfer material.  This has led to limited commitment from the Washington Office, the Council of Western State Foresters, Forest Service Research, and State and Private Forestry.  And ultimately the net affect has been reduction in positions, namely the center’s technology transfer position, and resources to perform basic transfer of U&CF research technology.

Forest Service capacity is not commensurate with its expanded mission of contributing scientific resources and practices to natural resource management.  In the research arena, for example, there has been a decrease in the number of scientists, particularly during the last decade.  What are you doing to ameliorate the impact of such dwindling capacity?

The best way to characterize the situation is to understand that, more and more, we are losing the distinction between urban areas and rural forestland, and that this loss of “boundaries” is expected to increase in the future.  The Chief’s threats have an urban-rural dimension that has implications for our center, particularly the fire component in the wildlife-urban interface.  Therefore, to survive this reduction in the number of scientists, it is in our best interest to demonstrate the value that we add to a better understanding of the continuum of forests from urban to rural.  By positioning ourselves in this regard within the Pacific Southwest Research Station we will be better able to compete for research dollars that become available that are not typically for urban forest research.   And to demonstrate our commitment to repositioning we recently conducted a retreat to investigate future possibilities for our research and to refocus our thinking so that we are more available to the larger effort of PSW.  The major outcome of the retreat was a new research concept that could guide our Center’s effort in PSW over the next decade. 

This concept is best described as the “One Forest.”  That concept emphasizes the continuity of our forests, landscapes and other ecosystems across all lands, from the inner city forests of major metropolitan areas to the most remote parts of our national forests and wilderness areas.  The connection is demonstrated through associations within, and across, individual watersheds and expressed in the relationship each ecosystem has, whether rural or urban, to water, climate, invasive species, soils, wildlife, and the restorative power of fire.