The Use of Volunteer Initiatives in Conducting Urban Forest Resource Inventories

Bloniarz, David; Ryan, H. Dennis

doi:10.48044/jauf.1996.010

Cited by 15 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…Unsurprisingly, communities with a higher per-capita budget were also less likely to include volunteers. One could conclude that perhaps volunteers are a replacement for staff in communities that suggested they were underfunded (McPherson and Johnson 1988;Bloniarz and Ryan 1996;Moskell et al 2016). This study did not support the claim that volunteers replaced municipal staff.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Training personnel prior to conducting tree activities is important for proper implementation of work. The efficacy of volunteers properly conducting an activity, perhaps as compared to professional standards, is important for quality control (Bloniarz and Ryan 1996;Galloway et al 2006). Bloniarz and Ryan (1996) found 83% agreement between trained volunteers and certified arborists assessing the condition of trees.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…People tend to have a greater sense of pride when involved with stewardship projects (Mincey and Vogt 2014). Volunteers can possibly initiate and/ or complete projects that would otherwise not occur due to a lack of resources (McPherson and Johnson 1988;Bloniarz and Ryan 1996;Miles et al 1998;Snyder and Omoto 2008;Pincetl 2010;Moskell et al 2016). Community involvement may also lead to greater tree survival (Sklar and Ames 1985;Mincey and Vogt 2014;Widney et al 2016).…”

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confidence: 99%

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A Volunteer and Partnership Baseline for Municipal Forestry Activity in the United States

Hauer¹,

Timilsina²,

Vogt³

et al. 2018

AUF

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Communities cultivate citizen support of municipal forestry operations through volunteers and partnerships. Through a national census and survey of urban forestry activity in over 660 municipalities in the United States, researchers found two-thirds of all responding communities involve volunteers in tree activities. This increases from half of small communities (2,500 to 4,999 people) to all large communities (one million or more people) involving volunteers. When tabulated for the United States, a mean national estimate of 345,466 (195,754 SEM) people volunteered 1,484,204 (665,460 SEM) hours with municipal tree activities. This equates to 714 (320 SEM) full-time equivalent (2,080 hour-base year) positions. Overall, volunteers completed nearly 5% of municipal tree care activities. Nearly 80% of the municipalities train their volunteers. Tree planting (85% of communities) was the most common activity, followed by tree watering (40%), awareness/education programs (39%), tree pruning (28%), and fundraising (20%). Findings were contrasted with U.S. census population groups to disaggregate if volunteerism varied by community size. Volunteers were more commonly involved in communities with a greater urban-forestry capacity derived from a sustainability index score. Six attributes of municipal forestry program had either positive (+) or negative (-) effect on volunteer participation in urban forestry activities. These included adequate budget (-), per capita spending (-), tree board (+), outreach (+), strategic plan (+), and total employment (+).

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Volunteer and Partnership Baseline for Municipal Forestry Activity in the United States

Hauer¹,

Timilsina²,

Vogt³

et al. 2018

AUF

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“…The next step was to attend a three-hour in-field training exercise in which participants learned the TC2015 datacollection methodology and received a gear pack containing a t-shirt, safety vest, leaf-identification guide, tape measure, and surveyor's wheel. TC2015 had a shorter training time than other similar efforts (Bloniarz et al 1996;Cozad et al 2005;Roman et al 2017) with the aim of accommodating more people. After this introductory field training, participants could join frequent data collection events in neighborhoods across NYC; after two events, they could request to map independently.…”

Section: Project Designmentioning

confidence: 98%

Every Tree Counts: Reflections on NYC’s Third Volunteer Street Tree Inventory

Crown¹,

Greer²,

Gift³

et al. 2018

AUF

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TreesCount! 2015 (TC2015) was the third citizen-participatory inventory of street trees in New York City, New York, U.S. Every ten years, the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation has worked with citizen scientists to record the location, size, species, and condition of all public curbside trees. Volunteer street tree inventories promote awareness of the importance of the urban forest and support municipal urban forest management. New York City’s prior street tree inventories in 1995 and 2005 led to advances in customer service, funding for routine street tree pruning, and urban greening initiatives. TC2015 attracted 2,241 voluntary participants through multiple recruitment efforts, more than doubling involvement from 2005. Fully digital data collection improved data quality and facilitated near-real-time quality assurance of data, and advanced tree location methods increased spatial data accuracy from past inventories. Data-collection events and reward strategies were also implemented to promote volunteer engagement. Citizen scientists collected tree location data with a high-level of accuracy (96.1%) after minimal training. All 666,134 street trees surveyed in TC2015 populated NYC Parks’s operational forestry database, as well as a public facing map (NYC Street Tree Map) for tree stewards. The following paper describes TC2015 project design and execution, outlines some of the key changes made since the first inventory in 1995, and provides results-based recommendations for practitioners planning similar projects.

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“…Presenters and attendees included research scientists, public land managers, nonprofit leaders, and civic stewards-reflecting the broad interest in applied research and adaptive management approaches to advance the practice of urban forestry. The development of the symposium was inspired by the sense that while citizen science has recently been applied to a wide range of urban forest management needs-including street tree inventories (Kocher 2012;Campbell 2015;DiSalvo et al 2017), tree survival monitoring (Roman et al 2013), and detection of invasive plants and diseases (Haw-thorne et al 2015;Meetenmeyer et al 2015)-it has not yet received much attention in the scholarly literature, with the exception of a few studies of volunteer data quality (Bloniarz and Ryan 1996;Cozad 2005;Roman et al 2017). There is, however, an extensive body of literature on citizen science in other ecological systems, such as public parklands and coastal aquatic communities, and taxonomic groups such as birds, butterflies, frogs, and plants (Bonney et al 2009;Dickinson et al 2010;Dickinson et al 2012;Tulloch et al 2013).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Civic Science in Urban Forestry: An Introduction

Roman¹,

Campbell²,

Jordan³

2018

AUF

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Civic science in urban forestry is a means of engaging the public in the study, management, and care of urban trees, and includes varied approaches with different disciplinary foundations. For instance, citizen science has been gaining prominence in urban forestry, with municipalities and nonprofits engaging volunteers in data collection for inventories and monitoring. Residents can also get involved in other stages of urban forest research and management, including framing goals and questions, conducting analyses, interpreting data, and applying results. Diverse forms of public engagement have brought expanded stakeholders into the fold of knowledge production and stewardship of urban greenspaces, including co-management and civic ecology practices. As municipalities, states, nonprofits, and scientists undertake these various forms of civic science, there is a need for basic research about the nature of civic engagement in urban forestry, empirical evidence about best practices for different approaches, and the impacts of volunteering on the participants themselves. This special issue of Arboriculture & Urban Forestry aims to advance the scholarship of civic science in urban forestry by addressing these topics, among others, with contributed articles. In this introduction to the special issue, we briefly review terms related to civic science to connect these interrelated bodies of inquiry to urban forestry, and present the research studies and practitioner notes included in this special issue. We then conclude with a discussion of future research needs for civic science in urban forestry, including technological tools to enable data democratization, engaging marginalized and under-represented urban communities, and supporting transdisciplinary exchanges between research and practice.

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The Use of Volunteer Initiatives in Conducting Urban Forest Resource Inventories

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

A Volunteer and Partnership Baseline for Municipal Forestry Activity in the United States

A Volunteer and Partnership Baseline for Municipal Forestry Activity in the United States

Every Tree Counts: Reflections on NYC’s Third Volunteer Street Tree Inventory

Civic Science in Urban Forestry: An Introduction

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