Ecosystem services of urban trees and forests

Why measuring the services of urban trees is so important

Trees along roads and footpaths, in avenues, parks, gardens and urban forests in urban and rural areas reduce environmental pollution, clean the air and water, reduce heat stress and bind CO2. With their ecosystem services, they thereby increase resilience to climate impacts and are of great importance to people as well as nature. Green spaces in urban and rural areas are therefore often referred to as "green lungs." However, although they play an important role in urban adaptation, urban forests are themselves vulnerable to climate change. Moreover, trade-offs may occur between different ecosystem services (e.g., cultural services vs. regulating services). To assess and possibly resolve these, a quantitative and qualitative assessment of ecosystem services (or valuation) is needed.

... and how we evaluated the urban tree health

How healthy are the trees in and around Karlsruhe? Does one tree species have a particularly hard time? Or is there something like location-dependent health patterns in the trees? To answer these and other questions, in addition to the above-mentioned parameters, tree physiological studies were also carried out on trees in urban green spaces, private areas (e.g. gardens) and forests close to the city in Karlsruhe and Rheinstetten. For this purpose, we examined health indicators on the trunk, branches, and leaves of the tree, such as water veins, wounds, dead and severed branches, and discolored or wilted leaves. The first goal here was to better understand the behavior and response of trees to the urban environment and drought. And based on this, to get a better overview of the city-wide tree population and its health to better assess the ecosystem services provided by the trees.