Human tree interactions: What are your favourite urban trees?

Urban forestry is a fascinating and fast growing new research field where interactions between people and trees are of great interest. Parks are particularly important in urban environments for air quality, noise reduction and recreation to name but a few benefits.

The design of urban parks is usually based on assumptions including how, for example, certain arrangements of trees and the selection of tree species (and associated foliage or bark) may affect people’s minds. However, there is usually little direct research into people’s actual perception.

As part of this master thesis, a student would organise 2-3 experiments involving 10-15 test persons starting with pre-school children and then successively moving on to school children, young adults and senior citizens. The student can freely pick a park in a town of her or his choosing. The test persons would independently select 10 trees which they perceive as their most favourite trees without ranking them. Accompanying interviews may help to study the challenges of and the reasons for selecting these trees.

The data will be analysed using some of the methodology included in chapter 7 of Pommerening and Grabarnik (2019) to shed light into the tree-selection behaviour of the test persons with respect to their life development phase. This project connects urban forestry with behavioural science.

Literature

Pommerening, A. and Grabarnik, P., 2019. Individual-based methods in forest ecology and management. Springer Nature, Cham, 411p.

Contact: Prof. Arne Pommerening (arne.pommerening@slu.se)

UrbanForestry.pdf