Modelling Ecosystem Services of Trees in Cities
Speaker Information
David Nowak is an Emeritus Senior Scientist with the USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station in Syracuse, NY. His research investigates urban forest structure, health, and change, and its effect on human health and environmental quality. He has authored over 375 publications and led the development of the i-Tree software suite that quantifies the benefits and values from vegetation globally.
Urban trees provide numerous values and services to society. Understanding these ecosystem services is critical to guiding forest management to enhance urban forest values for future generations. To this end, various models and procedures have been developed and released through i-Tree (www.itreetools.org) to help easily assess urban forest structure and its consequent ecosystem services and values. This presentation will discuss how one can use these tools and the modeling process behind the tools that is used to assess and value local urban forest structure, how structure changes, and various ecosystem services.