Insights / Research
Research
Urban Water Journal
From site-scale to landscape-scale: stormwater benefits of urban trees with SWMM-Canopy
A new process-based tool, SWMM-Canopy, models how urban trees reduce stormwater runoff and, applied in a California case study, lets planners evaluate the hydrologic and economic …
Urban Forestry & Urban Greening
Disparities in NatureScore across U.S. public schools: implications for environmental and socioeconomic equity
A national analysis of 65,406 U.S. schools finds that nature access (measured by NatureScore™) is unequally distributed, with lower scores at schools serving more economically dis…
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science
Modeling the relationship between urban tree canopy, landscape heterogeneity, and land surface temperature: A machine learning approach
A machine-learning study across nine U.S. cities in different climate zones finds that urban tree canopy consistently lowers land surface temperature, but the spatial configuratio…
ResearchGate
Examining environmental justice in urban forest management and decision-making
This dissertation explores environmental justice in US urban forestry, revealing how management plans and city foresters often overlook equity and recognitional justice for margin…
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
Flood Buyouts and Green Infrastructure: Effects on Local Property Values
Research in Harris County shows nearby flood buyouts can reduce property values and the tax base, but tree canopy coverage helps mitigate these effects and boosts resilience .
Frontiers in Sustainable Cities
Pursuit of environmental justice in urban forest planning and practice
Interviews with urban foresters in San Francisco and Seattle reveal how each city pursues environmental justice differently (San Francisco emphasizing distributional justice, Seat…
University of Washington Evans School
Lakewood Urban Forestry Implementation Guide
This report provides the City of Lakewood with an urban forestry program implementation guide to meet its 2021 climate plan goals of expanding tree canopy cover from 26% to 40% by…
Remote Sensing of Environment
UrbanWatch: A 1-meter resolution land cover and land use database for 22 major cities in the United States
UrbanWatch maps 22 major U.S. cities at a 1-meter resolution using the AI-driven FLUTE framework, achieving 91.52% accuracy across nine land cover classes to power smarter urban p…
Sustainable Cities and Society
Feasibility of afforestation as an equitable nature-based solution in urban areas
A framework combining census, satellite, and derived data identifies suitable urban afforestation sites in California, finding room for 36 million additional trees that could cut …
Remote Sensing
Tree, Shrub, and Grass Classification Using Only RGB Images
A deep learning method (DeepLabV3+) classifies trees, shrubs, and grass from RGB images alone, with median frequency weighting improving accuracy for underrepresented classes like…
Climate
Air-Temperature Response to Neighborhood-Scale Variations in Albedo (Reflected Solar Energy) and Canopy Cover in the Real World
Fine-resolution WRF modeling combined with car-mounted mobile temperature measurements in Los Angeles shows that increasing surface albedo and tree canopy cover delivers significa…
UC Davis: Information Center for the Environment.
Biomass, Carbon Sequestration, and Avoided Emissions: Assessing the Role of Urban Trees in California
This collaborative report by UC Davis, the USDA Forest Service, and CAL FIRE assesses the current status of urban tree canopy and its benefits across California, while identifying…
