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| 15 March 2010
There’s a pretty good chance that any reader of this page likes trees. And we like them for all sorts of reasons: for supporting the tree houses of our childhoods, for housing the birds that sing us awake in the morning, for giving our children a place to swing, for the memories that are attached to them, for their cool shade on brutal summer days, or the shelter from an unexpected rain shower.
But we might not always appreciate just how much work trees are doing to improve our environment. They help clean the air of pollutants, reduce our energy consumption, filter stormwater before it reaches the Bay, and reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to help fight climate change. In other words, they provide valuable services that help the ecosystem function properly.
Scientists at the US Forest Service’s Center for Urban Forest Research (my former employer!) have been working for decades to quantify these ecosystem services, so that we can have hard data to back up our intuition that trees are awesome (and to help policy makers understand their value). We’re making use of their research to provide what I think is one of the coolest features of the Urban Forest Map—its calculations of these ecosystem services––so you can see how hard the trees in your backyard or in your neighborhood or across San Francisco are working.
So, consider this an introductory post. For the rest of the week, I’ll tackle each of those four aspects I mentioned above, explain how trees do what they are doing and give some numbers from a recent study of San Francisco done by the Center for Urban Forest Research. In the future, we’ll talk more about less tangible benefits (like wildlife habitat, effects on health, sense of place) too.
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