Expectations of i-Tree Eco as a tool for urban tree management in Nordic cities

Johanna Deak Sjöman^1* Eeva-Maria Tuhkanen² Miia Mänttäri² Zofie Cimburova³ Sanna Stålhammar¹ David Barton⁴ Thomas B. Randrup¹

• ¹Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden
• ²Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), Finland
• ³Norwegian Environment Agency, Norway
• ⁴Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), Norway

While urban forests are recognized as imperative towards climate adaptation in cities and provide health and recreational benefits to citizens, municipal tree officers often struggle to find successful governance arrangements and budget support towards long lasting investment and implementation in new planting schemes and protection of existing trees. Since its release in 2006, i-Tree Eco has helped urban tree officers worldwide to find tangible leverage in the means of quantitative mapping, numeric measures and economic values of ecosystem services. This may in turn help ease grid locks and potentially support constructive dialogues across sectors, with decision makers and public engagement. With the release of i-Tree Eco v. 6 in Europe 2018, 13 Nordic cities were engaged in a larger research project with ambitions to use i-Tree Eco for the purpose of retrieving numeric and monetary data of the biophysical structures and ecosystem services of the urban forest. Based on questionnaires and semistructured interviews we present the results from the Nordic i-Tree project with focus on expectations, opportunities and potential barriers experienced in using i-Tree Eco in urban forest management. The most prominent expectation and foreseeing opportunities was recognized towards using numeric information on trees to change policies and support cross-sectoral collaboration while reaching politicians and the public. Identified barriers involved how limited resources are spent on public outreach, and how information about the project to relevant stakeholders were not distributed from the beginning which may have implications on the dissemination of results. As some important ecosystem services, e.g., cultural services, are not captured by i-Tree Eco, presenting the partial value of urban trees may pose also potential risks to cross-sectoral collaboration. Other findings conclude that although numeric information on ecosystem services are seen beneficial in terms of communicating to different stakeholders, a deeper understanding towards the criteria used in the valuation process and the potential risks of numeric approaches may provide more context specific applications.