2020 News
December 2020- Moxley and Fischer (2020) paper highlighted on O’Neill SPEA’s Racial Justice research page
Donovan Moxley and Burney Fischer’s 2020 paper, Historic HOLC redlining in Indianapolis and the legacy of environmental impacts is currently featured on the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs new webpage showcasing research addressing issues of racial justice. The webpage was created this fall and includes summaries of a variety of projects done by SPEA faculty and students. A quote from the webpage illustrates the importance of this work. “By studying relationships marked by racial injustice—like those between law enforcement and minority students, racial segregation and urban ecology, or COVID-19 and vulnerable populations—scholars at the Indiana University O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs are researching ways to create a path toward transformative, sustainable change”.
November 2020- Google analytics report on use of BUFRG site
Since mid-September we have been using Google Analytics to assess, as examples, how the BUFRG site is used by visitors, how much traffic we get, and which pages receive the most views. We wanted to share some of the interesting findings from the October report. The month saw 112 users, 104 of which were new to the site. Many logged in more than once and on average viewed two pages on the site. While most site visitors logged in from the United States, people logged in from as far away as India, Portugal, and Bangladesh and represented four continents (North America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania). The homepage had the most views, followed by Publications, Recent News (this page), and People. The Projects page was also frequently visited, with attention attracted to several of the specific projects described. We will use the data from the reports to determine which areas of the website are most useful to our visitors, and also which areas may need to be given greater visibility, with the goal being to ensure our website it an effective communication tool.
September/October 2020- BUFRG Collaborators Sarah Mincey and Jess Vogt contribute to Forest Service Resource and Field Guides
Dr. Sarah Mincey and Dr. Jess Vogt were both contributing writers to two recent USDA Forest Service publications. Urban Tree Monitoring: A Resource Guide and Urban Tree Monitoring: A Field Guide are companion documents created to bring guidance for urban forestry professionals and citizen scientists regarding monitoring of tree and forest conditions. Topics covered include necessary data sets to collect and methodology for monitoring urban trees. Abstracts for each are included below.
Urban Tree Monitoring: A Resource Guide:
The guidelines proposed in Urban Tree Monitoring: A Resource Guide (hereafter referred to as the Resource Guide) were developed and refined over many years to address the need for standardized urban tree monitoring protocols. The Resource Guide provides in-depth guidance for urban forest managers and researchers who want to design and implement a tree monitoring project. This Resource Guide is a companion to Urban Tree Monitoring: A Field Guide; however, the Resource Guide can also be used on its own. The Resource Guide is divided into three parts. In Part I, we discuss (1) the varied goals of monitoring projects and how to match data collection to those goals, (2) the development of these urban tree monitoring standards, (3) types of monitoring projects, and (4) connections to other protocols for urban tree data collection. We offer guidance on methods for recording tree location, developing tree record identifiers, organizing spreadsheets and databases, choosing data collection systems, fostering research-practice partnerships, training crews, and managing fieldwork. In Part II, we present five monitoring data sets: Minimum Data Set, Tree Data Set, Site Data Set, Young Tree Management Data Set, and Community Data Set. We list study goals that could be addressed with each data set and descriptions of relevant variables. We also provide guidance regarding which variables are best suited for beginner and advanced crews. Lastly, in Part III we include appendices with additional resources for designing and implementing tree monitoring projects.
Urban Tree Monitoring: A Field Guide
This report provides detailed protocols for urban tree monitoring data collection. Specifically, we discuss the core variables necessary for field-based monitoring projects, including field crew identification, field crew experience level, tree record identifier, location, site type, land use, species, mortality status, crown vigor, and trunk diameter. The intent of this Field Guide is to serve urban forest managers and researchers who collect longitudinal field data on urban trees, as well as interns and citizen scientists. This report is a companion document to Urban Tree Monitoring: A Resource Guide.
August 2020- BUFRG Collaborator Dr. Sarah Mincey teaching Urban Forest Management for Fall Semester
Dr. Mincey will teach Urban Forest Management for the second year this Fall, instructing virtually due to the pandemic. The majority of students enrolled are undergraduates from the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs focused on Environmental Management, but the class also includes students seeking master’s degrees in Environmental Sustainability or Environmental
Science from O’Neill as well as others in various departments across the university. Urban Forest Management (E422/E522) was first offered by Dr. Burney Fischer in 2006 and has continued to be a popular option for both undergraduate and graduate students.
The course is framed from a social-ecological perspective that will allow for nuanced evaluation of urban forest management decisions. Students will explore the ecosystem services urban forests provide, gain an understanding of tree data collected in municipal urban forest inventories, and learn about tree biology, morphology, and taxonomy while also delving into the complexity of the governance of urban forests. Guest speakers will visit throughout the semester representing a variety of actors involved urban forest management and include nonprofit leaders, GIS analysts, municipal urban foresters, and university researchers.
While the course will take place online, students will still get the opportunity to work directly with their surrounding urban forests when they conduct an inventory of trees in their own neighborhoods, whether these neighborhoods are in Bloomington or beyond. Additionally, each student will participate in a tree planting and reflect on the process based on what they have learned during the course.
The figure below explains the conceptual framework of actors and institutions involved with the urban forest described in the Schimitt-Harsh and Mincey paper described in the text to the right.
July 2020- Sarah Mincey publishes new paper on socio-ecological systems and the urban forest
Dr, Sarah Mincey, BUFRG collaborator and Clinical Associate Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, is a co-author with former BUFRG research Mikaela Schmidt-Harsh, on a new publication in Ecology and Society, Operationalizing the socio-ecological system framework to assess residential forest structure: a case study in Bloomington, Indiana. Please see the abstract below for a summary of the findings.
Many actors, from the individual to neighborhood to municipal scale, influence the management of trees, grass, and other vegetation on residential properties. Recent work has been directed toward understanding the ecological characteristics of residential landscapes and the human drivers of landscape management; however, much of this work remains disciplinarily focused
and at a single scale of analysis. This study employs a mixed-method approach to examine household- and neighborhood-scale drivers of urban residential tree species richness and tree canopy structure. A stratified sampling design was used to capture households in homeowners associations (HOAs) and neighborhood associations (NAs) to better understand the informal and formal institutions having an impact on residential tree management practices. We used the social-ecological system (SES) framework to build a classification system for identifying significant variables that influence residential tree composition and cover. Results of this work demonstrated tree species richness and canopy cover to be positively related to tree abundance and housing age, which is suggestive of the legacy effect. Governance variables were more strongly correlated with tree species richness whereas variables reflecting socioeconomic status
and education were more strongly correlated with canopy cover. Rule compliance and fitting in with neighborhood landscaping norms was significantly more important to HOA households than NA households. Conversely, opportunities to work together to solve community problems were viewed more positively by NA households than HOA households. For all parcels together, compliance with city and HOA/NA rules was negatively related to tree species richness and canopy cover, a finding that may implicate the nature of rules that focus on tree removal practices and barriers to plant (what and where). This work is timely given the rapid expansion of neighborhood associations in urban areas, which parallels establishment of rules governing residential yard practices. If current arboriculture and urban forestry standards are considered during rule formation and implementation, such rules have the potential to promote species diversity and the sustained provisioning of ecosystem services.
June 2020 Part Two- Statewide urban forest map featured in Indiana Public Media story
The work of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute, including BUFRG collaborator Dr. Sarah Mincey, in creating a statewide map of Indiana’s urban forests was the subject of a story on WFIU. Mincey was interviewed for the story and emphasized how urban trees provide important ecosystem services such as reduced heat island effect, but that there is inequity in canopy cover - often a legacy of historical redlining - that leaves gaps in the presence of these ecosystem services for many urban residents. When municipalities do tree inventories, these gaps can be better assessed, and communities can take action to ensure greater equity in access to the benefits of urban trees. Having a comprehensive map of the state’s urban forests available to the public could play a role in encouraging more communities to complete inventories of their urban forests. The research team plans to have the map online and accessible to the public by the end of the summer.
June 2020- Jess Vogt publishes two new urban forestry papers
Jess Vogt, BUFRG collaborator and Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Studies at Depaul University, has recently published two new papers, Urban Forests: Biophysical Features and Benefits, and Urban Forests as Socio-Ecological Systems in the journal Encyclopedia of the World’s Biomes. The abstracts for each are included below.
Urban Forests: Biophysical Features and Benefits-
Urban forests are all the trees, forests, associated vegetation growing in or very near the cities, towns, and communities where people live, work, and play. What makes urban forests different from forests outside urban areas is their existence in dense areas of human settlement—cities, towns, suburbs, etc. What qualifies as urban from the standpoint of urban forestry includes a range of population sizes or densities (parallel to the Ellis et al. (2010) mapping of anthropogenic biomes, or anthromes, to human population densities): There is no minimum threshold for how many people must live in a community for it to have an urban forest, and the term urban forestry is applied to the management of populations of trees in communities of all sizes. This article discusses the definitions of urban, urban forests, and urban forestry, describes the biophysical characteristics of urban forests and what makes urban forests different from non-urban forests, and details the ecosystem services and disservices provided by urban forests
Urban Forests as Socio-Ecological Systems-
Urban forests are all the trees, forests, associated vegetation growing in anthromes with higher levels of population density (e.g., dense settlements and populated woodlands). This chapter describes the important human elements of urban forest ecosystems, including actors, ownership regimes, and management, the distribution of urban forest benefits, the direct costs of urban forests, and current conceptions of urban forest sustainability. The chapter concludes by presenting a comprehensive framework for understanding the many factors that shape urban forests as social-ecological systems of inseparable natural and human components.
May 2020- Burney Fischer provides tree planting advice for Sycamore Land Trust Arbor Day celebration
For this year’s Arbor Day celebration, Sycamore Land Trust has gathered together a collection of useful resources and information so that anyone planting a tree this spring can experience a successful planting, whether in their own yard or elsewhere. Many of their suggestions come from the City of Bloomington’s Tree Care Manual , and the group also shares Burney’s advice for those planning on planting a tree this spring “As Burnell Fischer, a member of Sycamore’s Advisory Board and a clinical professor emeritus in clinical and urban forestry at IU, explains, we strive for a broad diversity of species to encourage overall ecological health and biodiversity. There’s no one perfect tree for every situation!” The article closes with species suggestions and details on care of newly planted trees.
April 2020- Donovan Moxley and Burney Fischer published in O'Neill School's Journal of Public and Environmental Affairs
Historic HOLC Redlining in Indianapolis and the Legacy of Environmental Impacts
Redline mapping was adopted by the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s to help assess its lending risk based on observable characteristics in urban neighborhoods across the United States, but the practice has been criticized for evident racial discrimination in addition to financial risk assessment. Researchers have demonstrated that modern urban tree canopy cover is lower in the historically redlined zones of four US cities. This article focuses on Indianapolis, Indiana, where a HOLC map was developed in 1937. Analysis using a geographic information system (GIS) was conducted in order to detect evidence of ecological legacies of redlining. Using this method, evidence of relatively high-intensity development, low greenspace and forest cover, and disproportionately high incidences of brownfield sites, Superfund sites, industrial waste sites, and Interstate highways were detected in historically redlined zones in Indianapolis. While opportunities for further and more detailed research are considered, the method employed here should be developed such that it is replicable for other cities with redlining histories in Indiana and other surrounding states with comparable spatial datasets. This example protocol can be adopted and refined by various stakeholders to establish where the need may exist for programmatic solutions and to better inform policy recommendations.
March 2020- Fischer and Freeman-Day interviewed by Indiana Daily Student about IUB’s Tree Campus USA recognition. https://www.idsnews.com/article/2020/02/iu-earns-tree-campus-usa-recognition-for-12th-consecutive-year
Indiana University-Bloomington was recently awarded Tree Campus USA for the 12th consecutive year by the Arbor Day Foundation. IUB was a member of first Tree Campus USA awards in 2008 and has submitted its credentials and met the standards in each succeeding year.
Professor Fischer reflected on IUB’s history of being a Tree Campus USA. He was a member of the Arbor Day Foundation’s committee that designed Tree Campus USA in 2007 and was able to assist IUB during that period to prepare them for the upcoming five standards. The five standards are “a tree advisory committee, campus tree care planning, dedicated annual expenditures for the campus tree program, having an Arbor Day of observance and provide a service-learning project”; all needed to be addressed quickly for IUB to achieve qualification. BUFRG PhD student Stephanie Freeman-Day briefly explained her research work examining the history of protecting urban forest patches on IU’s campus.
February 2020- BUFRG Researchers Vogt and Mincey present at Indiana Arborist Association’s 72 Annual Conference - Urban Forestry Program, January 21, 2020
Collective impact for tree planting and research in Northwest Indiana -The CommuniTree effort
CommuniTree is a multi-organizational, collaborative, grant-funded tree planting effort in Northwest Indiana, led by NIRPC and the Student Conservation Association (SCA) and modeled after Collective Impact. In this presentation, I will discuss the framework behind the initiative, and present the results of research examining motivations for individual and organizational involvement in CommuniTree.
Speaker: Jess Vogt, Assistant Professor DePaul University, Department of Environmental Science & Studies
Urban Forests as Urban Green Infrastructure: A new spatial data platform to assess the resilience of the Indiana’s urban forests
This talk will address the work of the Urban Green Infrastructure Working Group within the IU Environmental Resilience Institute. The working group has partnered with Davey Resource Group and the IDNR Community and Urban Forestry Program Office to collect spatially referenced urban forestry data for a new spatial data platform available to the public. The platform will be discussed and the statewide data analyses are in process and will be presented.
Speaker: Sarah Mincey, Clinical Associate Professor, Indiana University, O’Neill SPEA
January 2020- Fischer offers Urban Ecology elective for graduate students at IUB O’Neill SPEA
Burney Fischer will again lead E555 Urban Ecology, a readings and discussion course, for master/PhD students. This year’s class has two broad themes for urban ecology. The first is Urban Ecology ‘In, Of and/or For the City’, which has resonated through the literature in recent years. A second is using the social-ecological framework to study how urbanization influences biodiversity, ecosystem function and the provisioning of ecosystem services to human populations sustainably. After a couple of introductory weeks exploring these and other related course sub-themes the class will develop a list of topics and then student teams will identify peer-reviewed and other articles, which is the basis for weekly discussions. A professional book or other appropriate review topic and a research paper are products developed by individual students during the semester. Student projects have resulted in presentations (papers or posters) at the Ecological Society of America Conference, the annual IUB Integrated Program for the Environment spring conference, the annual Indiana Academy of Science Conference as well as individual blog postings, etc.