Focus Group for Urban Forestry Research

Hi Laura,
The City of Ann Arbor has done a series of focus groups for the development of our urban and community forest management plan. Below are the questions we asked--some of our questions were directed at public trees but could easily be modified to change the focus to private trees.

Icebreaker:
What benefits provided by trees are important to you?
Prompt 1: Suggest that they think of environmental, social and economic benefits.
Prompt 2: Give some examples of benefits.


1. In your neighborhood,do you feel that there are too few or too many public trees?
2. In your neighborhood, how do you perceive the condition or health of the public trees?
3. Are you satisfied with the quanity and quality of trees where you work and shop in the city?
4. What aspects of current tree planting/maintenance practices are unclear to you? Do you wish to have more information about a particual issue/concern?
5. The city is developing Citizen Pruner training, how interested would you be in participating in this type of volunteer work?

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions at [email protected]. Good luck!



Kerry Gray
Urban Forest & Natural Resource Planning Coordinator
City of Ann Arbor
United States

Hi Kerry,
I am working with Laura on our tree forum project. We would like to evoke emotional responses through photographs. Would you have any photos available showing properties without trees, then photoshopped in trees? Have you used this photo technique in your focus groups?
Thanks,
Raquel

Raquel Ketterman
United States

Hi, Raquel (and Kerry, too).

More power to you for trying to increase the urban canopy. It's 97 degrees here in Cincinnati at 6:32pm and we don't have air conditioning. Because we have trees, it's only 86 inside the house, or, as we like to call it, summer.

If you're going to do photoshop you might want to photoshop in some serious shade-loving understory plants, too. We're losing a lot of trees in our neighborhood and as many of them are going to "gardeners" as are going to people who are afraid the trees'll fall on them and/or their houses in bad weather. It seems that to the gardeners "shade is bad for flowers and other ornamentals" so they chainsaw the canopy away and our neighborhood temperature goes up up up. Teaching them the beauty of shade-loving and partial-shade tolerant plants might go a long way to helping with this.

As for those who fear the trees -- aka "saw on the news how a man's daughter was smashed while walking her dog in the storm" or "did you read where that tree fell into the baby's room?' -- I'd like to ask Kerry how the Citizen Pruners' training deals with such fears while maintaining maximum shade.

All help welcome. And thanks.
michael burnham
Cincinnati, USA

michael burnham
Professor of Dramatic Arts
University of Cincinnati
United States

Oh my, that is a timely question for us, as we had a horrible storm 2 nights ago. Because of this I fear the loss of more beautiful mature trees from our area. This all just in time of beginning our surveys and focus groups!

Thanks for chiming in Michael!

Raquel

Raquel Ketterman
City of Cumberland, Maryland
United States

Hi Raquel,
We have not used that photo technique in any of our focus groups so unfortunately I don't have any pictures to share.



Kerry Gray
Urban Forest & Natural Resource Planning Coordinator
City of Ann Arbor
United States

Thanks everyone for the input. For anyone interested, CanVis is a really easy to use photo editing program. It's tailored to organizations that might need to visualize the outcome of a project and comes with a whole library of items that can be added to an image. We used it to add trees to pictures of residences and they turned out great!

http://www.csc.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/canvis/

Laura Smith
Intern
City of Cumberland
United States