Mapping Ecosystem Services, Disservices, and Ecological Requirements to Enhance Urban Forest Planning and Management in
In Padova, the municipal department of green infrastructure monitors the urban forest through a continuously updated database that stores information about locations, species, dimensions, health conditions, and management of more than 47,000 trees. The ai
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Mapping Ecosystem Services, Disservices, and Ecological Requirements to Enhance Urban Forest Planning and Management in Padova Chiara Cortinovis, Claudia Alzetta, and Davide Geneletti
Abstract In Padova, the municipal department of green infrastructure monitors the urban forest through a continuously updated database that stores information about locations, species, dimensions, health conditions, and management of more than 47,000 trees. The aim of the research presented in this chapter was to support urban forest planning and management by integrating the existing database with information about ecosystem services, disservices, and the ecological requirements of trees. We combined a quantitative analysis through i-Tree Eco with a qualitative assessment based on literature review and expert knowledge, and filled in 17 new fields for each tree in the database. Then, through a GIS, we investigated the spatial distribution of the analysed features across the city, thus revealing inequalities among different areas and mismatches with citizens’ preferences and needs. The enhanced database could potentially become a powerful tool, not only to identify and prioritize management interventions, but also, in a longer term perspective, to identify strategic goals with a view to coordinating local actions, thus ensuring a sustainable development of the urban forest and an equitable provision of ecosystem services to present and future generations.
C. Cortinovis (*) Centre for Environmental and Climate Research, Lund University, Lund, Sweden Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering, University of Trento, Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] C. Alzetta Department of Green, Parks and Urban Agriculture, Municipality of Padova, Padova, Italy D. Geneletti Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering, University of Trento, Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Arcidiacono, S. Ronchi (eds.), Ecosystem Services and Green Infrastructure, Cities and Nature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54345-7_13
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Keywords Urban trees · Municipal tree database · Tree management plan · i-Tree Eco · Ecosystem disservices · Tree ecological requirements · Spatial analysis · Urban planning
13.1 Introduction and Objectives Urban trees are fundamental components of urban green infrastructure and supply cities with key ecosystem services. Trees are especially relevant for the provision of many regulating services, through which green infrastructure affects environmental conditions in cities (Cortinovis and Geneletti 2019). Inter alia, urban trees cool down the temperature during summer through shading and evapotranspiration (Zardo et al. 2017), they purify the air from gaseous pollutants and particulate matter (Morani et al. 2011), they contribute to buffering anthropogenic CO2 emissions by sequestering and storing atmospheric carbon (Nowak et al. 2013), and they mitigate the propagation of noise (Van Renterghem 2014)
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