Branching Out: New Routes to Valuing Urban Treescapes

英国74%的地方当局宣布气候紧急状态，主题1和主题2的程度较低。在他们通过增加碳封存的植树目标来应对这一点的同时，他们也必须意识到森林逃逸可以提供的多重公共利益--健康和福祉、绿色基础设施、社会便利和绿色经济。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逃生形式有一个愿景；我们将提供证据和决策过程来实现这一愿景。大多数关于城市逃生的生物物理和舒适性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，树枝的象征价值、遗产价值、精神价值和社会文化价值(S和C)没有得到有意义的解释。随着围绕个别树木(谢菲尔德行道树)或树林(拟出售公共林地)的抗议活动出现，这个问题正变得越来越尖锐，来自商业和住房开发的压力加剧了这一问题。Branout Out将评估三个城市的城市树木的S和C值，并开发新的绘制、预测和传达这些值的方法，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不同的规划历史，支持我们的新方法随后的广泛采用。约克(历史上的)和加的夫(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。每个城市都有与树木逃生相关的特殊但并不罕见的挑战，已宣布进入气候紧急状态，并期待树木在缓解和适应方面发挥作用。我们的中心宗旨包括三个广泛的方法：1)联合制作，使用与公民和利益相关者的商议方法，以制定一个整体的价值框架；2)讲故事，创造对过去、现在和未来的意义和价值的叙事账户；3)地图，将生物物理特征与S和C的价值观联系起来。我们的方法将映射那些可概括的值和那些特定的和高度处于高度位置的值。我们的映射方法包括过去、现在和未来，使用历史来源来映射过去的值对当前树逃逸形式和功能的影响。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树冠特性，并对重点城市的生物物理数据进行标尺。该项目将满足地方当局对树木特征的高分辨率制图的需求，从而产生欧洲最大、最健壮的城市树木数据集，并伴随着S&C值的描述符，该描述符可用于利用免费可用的卫星数据在其他城市地区重建此类数据集。我们共同开发的工具将为地方当局提供可用的决策依据，以预测开发或变化对S&C价值的影响，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收益提供方面的不平等，因为树木逃逸会随着时间的推移而变化，从而更好地了解如何以及在哪里解决这些不平等问题。一系列设计研讨会将试验绘制与城市树木逃逸的遥感生物物理特征相关的S和C值的方法，产生感知和绘制数值的技术和工具。利用这些工具作为挑衅，我们将推测我们的城市踏板可能的未来，建立在对S&C价值观的欣赏和理解之上。通过这些方法，本项目将在地方和全国范围内将S和C的价值观嵌入到城市树木的规划和决策中，从而满足社会和未来的规划需求。

Addressing theme 1 and to a lesser extent theme 2.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.