Event


Penn's Campus as an Urban Forest: A History of Growing Canopy, 1870-Present

Lara A. Roman, US Forest Service, Philadelphia Field Station

Apr 13, 2016 at | 358 Hayden Hall

 

Penn’s landscape is part of the city’s urban forest: a collection of trees in a highly urbanized space. The history of trees on Penn’s campus sheds light on the long-term impacts of landscape management decisions and the drivers of urban forest change. This presentation focuses on the development of the campus urban forest from 1870 onwards, documenting over 140 years of landscape change. We studied tree management and key events impacting the urban forest using copious institutional and archival records. The study had a mixed methods approach, integrating those archival records with aerial photography and field data to construct a timeline of urban forest change. We found that the campus landscape was nearly devoid of trees in the late 19th century, with more green space added by closing city streets to create pedestrian walkways as well as creating gardens in the early 20th century. There was drastic increase in canopy cover from 1970 to 2012: 8.70% to 20.55%. Campus tree population size and canopy cover appears to be more stable in the early 21st century. These findings are situated in terms of institutional planning, historic land cover changes and urban greening movements that impacted urban forests. The Penn campus story shows that many decades of time, commitment and resources are necessary to increase canopy cover in dynamic urban landscapes. This assessment of campus canopy has broader implications for city-wide urban forest management, as municipalities across the US and around the world are turning to urban tree planting as a means to achieve sustainability goals.

http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/people/lroman