The myth of the urban forest (a)
Not being afraid to throw the proverbial cat at the pigeons, I have proposed a paper for the 2nd Asia Pacific Urban Forestry Meeting on why urban forests cannot exist…
The myth of the urban forest
Abstract: Urban forests are not naturally occurring mega-organisms, by definition they exist in urban and sub-urban areas in towns and cities. The make-up of an Urban forest is often expanded to include street and park trees. Urban forests are dynamic places, where the growing environment may completely change several times in the life of a tree.
With global trends of expanding urbanisation, the pressure and constraints placed on our urban forests will only increase. To manage and retain trees in the urban environment we cannot and should not try to manage trees as if they were part of a forest. By accepting that urban trees are just living structures that exist in the build environment, we can change our approach to managing them. For a tree to survive it must be able to be managed and manipulated to meet the changing needs of a particular site; to effectively manage our urban forests we need to acceptance that urban forests cannot exist.
Nothing exists in isolation and while we need to make clear the differences between a ‘natural’ forest and what we call the ‘urban’ forest, our best way of managing city trees is to consider them in the context of the ecological influences in their environment inclusive of anthropogenic influences.
Interesting hypothesis, if we look at how urban trees differ from their natural forest cousins;
They are subject to higher levels of atmospheric carbon, higher levels of other pollutants, more regular and extreme flash flooding, reduced root growth area availability, compaction, vandalism through excavations and underground services… Etc etc… This all makes a pretty damning picture that we need to address as a serious issue
However, we have dedicated parks programmes and replanting schemes, green spaces to name but a few, so I still believe we have hope
But for how long due to the bigger issue of global climate change, our old relic specimen trees are particularly vulnerable