Sustainability and the Urban Forest: An Ecosystem Services Perspective

Recently, urban forests have drawn attention due to interest in the idea that urban forests provide essential ecosystem services. Indeed, urban forests provide the benefits of a natural, cost effective system of green infrastructure: trees capture air and water pollutants, as well as provide shade, habitat, and even social structure. These services have a surprising but significant economic value, and attention to the design of urban forests can be a local means of capturing that value. From an ecosystem services perspective, the urban forest also reveals that the very existence of the nature in the urban area occurs as both a conceptual and a physical construct. That is, trees in the urban area result from intention and design.