Planning for Equitable Urban Landscapes (15-DG-11132544-035)

This project will develop new tools and maps focused on identifying communities underserved by urban forest green infrastructure, evaluating resilience under future scenarios, and optimizing management strategies to mitigate disparities and risks.

Specific project objectives are to: 1) develop tools within the US Forest Service’s i-Tree platform to identify current ecologically urderserved locations and prioritize urban forest management practices; 2) incorporate future scenarios of tree species composition, climate, pests and urban development into tools developed in objective 1 ; 3) create databases of underserved communities within 5 10 US urban areas, evaluate likely risks and resilience for these communities under climate and development scenarios, and develop optimized urban forest management strategies based on current and future estimates of composition and age structure, plantable space, and benefits; 4) disseminate developed tools and results through the i-Tree software platform, partnerships with regional urban planning agencies, a national planning workshop, conference presentations, journal articles, and webinars. Underserved communities will be engaged through The Nature Conservancy’s Leaders in Environmental Action for the Future program and community stakeholders. Deliverables from this project will provide urban managers/planners across the country a toolset to identify underserved communities and optimize investments focused on mitigating current conditions and future risks.

Has the project met the projected timeline of accomplishments? Is the project on schedule? Is the project ahead of schedule? Is the project behind schedule? If a no-cost time extension has been requested for this project, why is (was) it needed?
Project is on schedule. A virtual project update meeting was held on April 7, 2016 and was attended by all PIs (R. Fahey, S. Hirabayashi, D. Nowak, S. Maco, B. Toomey, C. Klimas). I-Tree Forecast model development is in progress by Davey/USFS PIs and will build on recently released i-Tree Landscape (https://landscape.itreetools.org/) functionality that will form part of the modeling process for the current project. Recruitment has been completed for RA position to conduct case study development – position will be filled by Elliott Volin who holds an MS in Environmental Science and MA in History from Florida State University and was recently honorably discharged as a Captain in the US Army.

Final Report Download

Click here to download the grant proposal narrative as a PDF.