Branching out new routes to valuing urban treescapes

74%的英国地方当局宣布进入气候紧急状态。当他们通过增加碳封存的植树目标来应对这一问题时，他们也必须意识到树木可以提供的多重公共利益——健康和福祉、绿色基础设施、社会舒适、绿色经济。地方当局需要对未来的社会需求和未来可能满足这些需求的树篱形式有一个远见；我们将提供证据和决策过程，以实现这一愿景。大多数关于城市树篱的生物物理和舒适方面的研究忽视了更广泛的社会和文化价值，这些价值不容易量化。因此，树篱的象征、遗产、精神和社会文化（S&C）价值没有得到有意义的解释。这一问题正变得越来越严重，因为围绕单个树木（谢菲尔德街的树木）或森林（拟议出售公共森林地产）的抗议活动越来越多，而商业和住房开发的压力又加剧了这一问题。“分支”项目将评估三个城市城市树木的S&C价值，并开发新的方法来绘制、预测和传达这些价值，以支持稳健的、基于证据的决策和管理。选定的三个重点城市有目的地具有不同的规划历史，支持随后广泛采用我们的新方法。约克（历史悠久）和卡迪夫（后工业时代）是县城，而米尔顿凯恩斯是20世纪60年代后的新城。每个城市都面临着与树木逃生相关的特殊但并不罕见的挑战，它们已宣布进入气候紧急状态，并希望树木在缓解和适应气候变化方面发挥作用。我们的核心原则包括三个广泛的方法：1)共同制作，使用与公民和利益相关者协商的方法，开发一个整体的价值框架；2)讲故事，对过去、现在和未来的意义和价值进行叙事；3)制图，将生物物理特征与S&C值联系起来。我们的方法将映射出具有普遍性的值和具有特殊性和高度定位的值。我们的制图方法包括过去、现在和未来，使用历史资料来绘制过去值对当前树状结构和功能的影响。我们将使用我们建立的树木公民科学平台Treezilla，从新的城市树木观测站收集生物物理数据。遥感将描述树木状况和冠层特性，并在重点城市之间缩放生物物理数据。该项目将满足地方当局对树木特征高分辨率地图的需求，从而产生欧洲最大、最强大的城市树木数据集，并附有S&C值描述符，可用于使用免费卫星数据在其他城市地区重建此类数据集。我们共同创建的工具将为地方当局提供可用的决策证据，以预测发展或变化对S&C值的影响，并使他们能够更准确地计算变化对生态系统服务的影响。这种多维映射可以揭示当前和未来福利提供方面的不平等现象，使人们更好地了解如何以及在何处解决这些不平等现象。一系列的设计研讨会将尝试绘制与城市树木的遥感生物物理特征相关的S&C值的方法，开发用于感知和绘制值的技术和工具。利用这些工具作为挑衅，我们将围绕对S&C价值观的欣赏和理解，推测我们城市树木逃生的可能未来。通过这些方法，该项目将把S&C的价值嵌入到地方和国家尺度的城市树木规划和决策中，从而满足现在和未来的社会和规划需求。

A climate emergency has been declared by 74% of UK local authorities. As they respond to this via increased tree planting targets for carbon sequestration, it is imperative that they also realise the multiple public benefits - health and wellbeing, green infrastructure, social amenity, the green economy - that treescapes can provide. Local authorities need a vision of future societal needs and the forms of future treescapes that might meet them; we will deliver the evidence and decision making processes to realise such a vision.Most studies on the biophysical and amenity aspects of urban treescapes neglect wider social and cultural values that cannot easily be quantified. Consequently, the symbolic, heritage, spiritual and social and cultural (S&C) values of treescapes are not meaningfully accounted for. This problem is becoming increasingly acute, as protests arise around individual trees (Sheffield street trees) or woods (proposed sale of the public forest estate), exacerbated by pressure from business and housing development. 'Branching Out' will evaluate the S&C values of urban trees across three cities, and develop new ways of mapping, predicting and communicating those values to support robust, evidence-based decision making and management.The three selected focus cities purposefully have different planning histories, supporting subsequent widespread adoption of our novel approach. York (historical) and Cardiff (post-industrial) are county towns, while Milton Keynes is a post-1960s new town. Each city has particular, yet not uncommon, challenges relating to their treescapes, has declared a climate emergency, and expects trees to play a role in mitigation and adaptation. Our central tenet comprises three broad approaches: 1) co-production, using deliberative methods with citizens and stakeholders, to develop a holistic value framework; 2) storytelling, creating narrative accounts of meaning and value of the past, present and future; 3) mapping, to link biophysical features and S&C values. Our approach will map both values that are generalisable and those that are particular and highly situated.Our mapping approaches encompass the past, present and future, using historical sources to map the impact of past values on current treescape form and function. We will use our established tree citizen science platform, Treezilla, to collect biophysical data from new Urban Tree Observatories. Remote sensing will characterise tree condition and canopy properties, and scale the biophysical data across the focal cities. This project will address local authorities' need for high-resolution mapping of tree characteristics, resulting in Europe's largest, most robust urban tree dataset, accompanied by descriptors of S&C value that can be used to recreate such datasets across other urban areas using freely available satellite data. The tools we co-create will provide local authorities with useable evidence for decision making to predict the impacts of developments or changes on S&C value, and enable them to calculate more accurately the impacts of changes on ecosystem services. Such multidimensional mapping can reveal inequalities in current and future provision of benefits as treescapes change through time, providing a better understanding of how and where those inequalities can be addressed.A series of design workshops will experiment with ways of mapping S&C values in relation to the remote-sensed biophysical characteristics of our urban treescapes, producing techniques and tools for sensing and mapping values. Using these tools as provocations, we will speculate on possible futures for our urban treescapes, built around an appreciation and understanding of S&C values. Through these methods this project will embed S&C values in planning and decision-making for urban trees at local and national scales, thereby meeting society's and planning needs now and in the future.