Theory to Practice of Urban Forest Management

Dr. Sharon Jean-Philippe is a Professor of Urban Forestry in the Department of Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries. She earned her M.S. in Botany and PhD. in Natural Resources from the University of Tennessee in 2005 and 2010. She is the undergraduate advisor for urban forestry students and teaches several courses within the urban forestry concentration. Sharon is a member of the International Society of Arboriculture Board of Directors and Board Treasurer; in addition, she serves on multiple state and national committees and advises student chapters of Gamma Beta Phi and Minorities in Agriculture Natural Resources and Related Sciences (MANRRS) at the University of Tennessee.

Dexter focuses on actionable, transdisciplinary, team science and working with urban natural resource managers his passion. He has degrees in Natural Resources Planning (University of Vermont), Environmental Science (Yale School of Environment), and Geography (Clark University). His research focuses on the world’s fastest changing ecosystems, where the dominant species is Homo sapiens: urban ecosystems. He has growing interests in synthesis, meta-science, open data, reproducibility, and replication. When not studying urban forests or programming in R and Python, he can be found volunteering with urban forestry groups in Maryland where he lives.

Dr Mark Bradford is the Professor of Soils and Ecosystem Ecology at the Yale School of the Environment. Bradford’s work focuses on the health, biology, ecology and carbon storage potential of forest, grassland and agricultural soils. He is interested in developing knowledge that allows us to predict how environmental change and management will affect the rates of carbon stabilization and decomposition processes, and hence how the size of soil organic carbon stores change in space and time. Since starting at Yale in 2009, Dr. Bradford has increasingly focused on practice-relevant issues, including experimental assessment of urban afforestation techniques as part of NYC’s Million Trees Initiative. 

Dr. Bradford holds a BSc and PhD in Biological Sciences from Exeter University in the UK.

Cecil has over 25 years of experience studying, teaching, and advising on aspects of urban forestry and nature-based solutions. He is widely considered as one of the world’s leading urban forestry experts, and his work has been featured by leading media outlets such as CNBC and in international documentary films. A Dutch national, he has lived and worked in Europe, Asia, and North America. Since 2016 he has been a professor of urban forestry at the University of British Columbia. Cecil helped found the leading academic journal Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, and edited seminal textbooks such as The Routledge Handbook of Urban Forestry. Cecil is passionate about using trees and nature to develop better cities, and always stresses the importance of building meaningful relationships between people and places. He has advised international organizations such as FAO, as well as national and local governments in more than 30 countries, and was an invited panelist at the 8th Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe in April 2021. Cecil currently lives in Barcelona from where he co-directs the Nature Based Solutions Institute, a think tank for the evidence-based greening of cities.

Max Piana is a research ecologist at the USDA Forest Service, based in Amherst, MA. From street trees to urban forested natural areas, Max’s research integrates concepts of restoration and plant ecology to inform management and planning in cities. He currently co-leads the Urban Phytotechnology Project in Philadelphia and the Urban Silviculture Network, which spans eight cities in the northeast U.S. Max is an alum of Yale (MEM, ‘11) and URI and received his PhD in Ecology & Evolution from Rutgers University, where he was land manager of the Hutcheson Memorial Forest Center.

Danica Doroski received her Ph.D. and M.F.S. from the Yale School of the Environment. She is currently the State Urban Forestry Coordinator at Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Prior to moving to Connecticut, Danica worked in New York City for the New York Restoration Project and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and in Philadelphia at the Morris Arboretum.

Jennifer Greenfeld is the Assistant Commissioner of Forestry, Horticulture, and Natural Resources for the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. In this role, she protects, restores, expands, and manages New York City’s urban forest, natural spaces and green infrastructure.  Over the last 24 years at Parks, Jennifer led critical efforts to study the health and mortality of street trees and to quantify the impact of trees on the urban environment. She played an important role in MillionTreesNYC, initiated and implemented the agency’s transition to Tree Risk Management, and has overseen the restoration and management of thousands of acres of natural areas including the completion of the first fish passage in New York City, on the Bronx River; the restoration of salt marshes and the planting of over 550,000 trees, shrubs, perennials, and grasses as a part of this management.

Prior to working for New York City Parks, Jennifer worked on land conservation and urban forestry in San Francisco and Washington DC . She obtained a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Master of Forest Science from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Professor Emeritus of the Departments of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning and Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley. During his 44 year career at the University of California he taught courses in ecological analysis, forest ecology, urban forestry, and California Landscapes. He currently teaches Urban Ecology and hydrology at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain. His research has focused on various aspects of urban forestry as well as studies of forest succession. The urban forest research includes studies of the effects of trees on air pollution in urban areas, transition of wildland forest to urban forests, the influence of biome characteristics on urban forests around the world, the reconstruction of urban forest destroyed by warfare, and the impact of climate change on street trees in California. McBride received a B.S. in forestry from the University of Montana and M.S. (Forestry) and Ph.D. (Botany) degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

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.

Dr. Timon McPhearson is Professor of Urban Ecology, Director of the Urban Systems Lab, and research faculty at the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School. He is a Senior Research Fellow at The Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University and a Research Affiliate of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. He is a Lead Author for the IPCC and member of the World Economic Forum Global Commission on BiodiversCities.  He studies the ecology in, of, and for cities to advance resilience, sustainability, and justice. His books Urban Planet and Resilient Urban Futures are widely read and his new book Nature-based Solutions for Cities will be out in 2022.  In 2019 he was awarded the Sustainability Science Award and the Innovation in Sustainability Science Award by the Ecological Society of America. In 2020 he was named an NYC Climate Hero by the NYC Department of Transportation and Human Impacts Institute and appointed by NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio to the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC).

Cassandra Johnson Gaither is a Research Social Scientist with the Southern Research Station, USDA Forest Service, in Athens, GA (cassandra.johnson@usda.gov).  Her research interests address human perceptions and interactions with nature and the environment.  She has published research addressing social group visitation to wild land recreation areas, environmental justice as this relates to minority and lower wealth group access to outdoor recreation facilities, and more recently, the intersection of socially vulnerable populations and environmental risk.  Her work currently focuses on the intersection of property ownership and social vulnerability in the South and the implications of the same for national forest management.

Dr. Mayra Rodríguez is an Urban Social Ecologist with close to eight years of experience in socio-ecological research and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Her work focuses on the interconnections between human-nature systems, especially in the urban context, and applies various approaches to help inform canopy expansion efforts from an equitable development and environmental justice perspective. Dr. Rodríguez has led city-wide and interregional research programs within and outside of the United States, and currently is a Gund Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Vermont working with the Spatial Analysis Laboratory.