Enhancing Resiliency in Baltimore's Urban Forest

Abstract

The City of Baltimore, as part of their climate adaptation strategy, has pledged to double their tree canopy by 2017 in the hopes of mitigating a variety of climatic hazards that are projected to worsen in the future. These hazards include the length and magnitude of heat and precipitation events, sealevel rise, and increased prevalence of extreme weather events such as tornados and coastal storms. In keeping with this goal of forest expansion, one of the strategies (strategy NS-2) put forth in Baltimore’s Disaster Preparedness and Planning Project (DP3) is to “increase and enhance the resilience and health of Baltimore’s Urban Forest.” To help the City of Baltimore meet their goal of successfully and sustainably expanding their urban forest, we have completed a five-staged approach centered around the creation of an interactive spatial decision support tool: (1) identification of urban forestry best practices and analysis of precedence to inform successful tree selection and planting; (2) a review of existing urban forestry practices and policies in other cities to identify cities leading the way on planning and growing a resilient urban forest and synthesizing lessons, strategies implemented, and challenges in these locations, (3) the integration of the USDA vegetation database outlining the preferred growing conditions and a variety of other attributes for the majority of eastern hardwood species, with a spatial database that includes site-specific environmental, situational, and risk factors; (4) the creation of a user-friendly interactive tool that ranks trees from the vegetation database based on site-specific characteristics; and (5) beta-testing of the tool with a variety of Baltimore stakeholders to generate buy-in, ensure its usability and longevity as a solution, and provide recommendations for future iterations of this model. Throughout the tool development process, we aimed to create an interface that is replicable across other cities, given the amount of need we have identified for a tool of this caliber, specificity, and integrated considerations. Based on beta-testing results with 17 stakeholders, carried out in Baltimore in late March, 2015, our tool was well-received and supported, and we anticipate that Baltimore officials will work to publically implement the tool in the coming months.