
Characterizing the Urban Tree Canopy (UTC) to elevate its role in mitigating climate change and creating a healthy and vibrant community in Ann Arbor, MI.
Ann Arbor, Michigan is affectionately called “Tree Town” due to its distinguishable and valued urban tree canopy (UTC). The city consists of roughly 18,605 acres with 6,015 acres identified as UTC in 2010 (Hanou, 2010). The City of Ann Arbor recognizes the importance and potential benefits the UTC can provide in its “Urban and Community Forest Management Plan” and also mentions them in the “A2Zero Climate Action Plan”. While the forest remains a priority, the management plan was implemented eight years ago, and the last canopy assessment occurred twelve years ago. Furthermore, this assessment delineates where the canopy is but does not provide details about canopy composition. Additionally, data is available regarding the City’s street trees, but certain locations, such as parks and private land, have little available canopy data. Like many city governments working to elevate positive UTC contributions to the community at large, Ann Arbor is in need of descriptive analyses to enhance current data. Our goals were to identify turfgrass, delineate native forest fragments, and classify trees by genus. By emphasizing these three areas, we sought to elevate the role of UTC as an ecosystem service, mitigator of climate change, and guiding factor in stewardship actions. While we were able to provide descriptive analyses of the UTC to enhance the City’s current dataset, the accuracy and reproducibility of our methods should be improved with future work. All three areas of focus could benefit from a better spatio-temporal alignment of imagery and tree data along with collecting ground truth data to test accuracy.
Lyndsay Zemanek, Alyssa Sklar, Thomas Estabrook, Christian Gray Schluter