Urban tree canopy analysis, anything missing from the picture?

Clara Jeanroy

Abstract

Due to high resources requirements of urban forests inventories, aerial assessments of tree canopies are becoming increasingly common. These involve recent technologies and approaches such as remote sensing or artificial intelligence. A growing body of literature relies and focusses on these approaches to research urban forest’s provision of ecosystem services (ES), such as carbon storage. However, there is currently a knowledge gap on which ES are underrepresented in these urban canopy analyses. Ultimately, if some benefits are missed, it could limit the understanding of urban forest’s full range of services and potential, which could in practice, contribute to poor management decisions. This literature review of 33 recent and peer-reviewed articles shows which ES are currently least addressed by non-inventory assessments. After developing a comprehensive list of urban forest benefits, categorised under the four main types (supporting, provisioning, regulating and cultural), each ES was assigned a score linked to the number of articles that mentioned or focussed on it. The services which had the lowest score, and thus were overall neglected from the studies, were Provisioning services. The canopy assessments almost exclusively focussed on Regulating ES, and a high number of different approaches were used in the literature to analyse them. Most Cultural ES were analysed but only by a limited number of articles. These results highlight the gap in current urban canopy assessments and may promote more research to evaluate discounted ES. If future studies find that current practices cannot analyse specific ES, they should promote and guide their improvement to achieve more comprehensive analyses.

Keywords: Ecosystem services, Urban tree canopy, Spatial assessment, Remote sensing, Predictive models, LiDAR

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