Special Issue: Smart Urban Forestry—Digital technologies and data for planning, design, and management

Special issue editors:
• Sophie Nitoslawski, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia
• Cecil Konijnendijk, Nature Based Solutions Institute

Short abstracts due April 15, 2021

Authors are invited to submit abstracts (250 words maximum) of manuscripts for the special issue, due April 15, 2021. Submissions should also include a list of authors, their affiliations, a title for the article, and a note about which article type the submission falls under (Original Articles, Review Articles, Short Communications). Abstracts should be emailed to editor Cecil Konijnendijk, with the subject line: “AUF special issue.”

Accepted abstracts invited to submit manuscripts between April 15 – June 1, 2021

The special issue editors will review the submitted abstracts. Those selected for the special issue will be invited to submit a full manuscript to AUF between April 15 – June 1, 2021. All manuscripts must follow the
journal’s instructions to authors (https://www.isa-arbor.com/AUF-Guidelines), including submitting through ScholarOne for peer review: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/auf.

About the Journal

Arboriculture & Urban Forestry is the bimonthly, peer-reviewed journal of the International Societyof Arboriculture, the  professional society of arborists. This publication disseminates new and original research findings centered on the care and management of trees in urban environments to researchers and professionals in urban forestry. Read the journal online.

Scope of the Special Issue

Cities are increasingly data-driven, and there is a growing interest in understanding how citizen engagement, connected technology, and data analytics can support sustainable development. Evidence has also repeatedly shown that green infrastructure such as urban forests address diverse urban challenges and are critical components of urban sustainability and resilience. It is thus timely to assess the role of urban forests and other green spaces in smart city planning. As technology becomes more ubiquitous in urban environments, and as pressure to maximize green benefits for all city dwellers rises, it is worthwhile for researchers and practitioners to consider associated challenges, opportunities, and implications for tree care and urban forest management. This special issue of AUF addresses current knowledge gaps by exploring how the planning, design, management, and use of urban trees, urban forests, and green infrastructure can be integrated into smart city planning. It will look at how digital technologies can be jointly used as tools to improve the delivery of forest benefits and enable stakeholder participation and engagement, for example, through citizen science.

Contributions to this special issue can cover one or more of the following topics:

• Understanding data quality for urban trees: technological challenges and opportunities.
• New technologies for data collection and data sharing in urban forestry: mobile applications, web dashboards, remote sensing tools and methods (unmanned aerial vehicles, ground-based sensors, etc).
• Data-driven coproduction of urban forestry knowledge by scientists, managers, and the public.
• Novel sources of data and new methods for arboricultural and urban forestry research.
• Uses for and implications of open data in arboricultural and urban forestry research.
• The role of smartphones and other mobile devices: volunteered geospatial information for design, planning, and management.
• The impact of automation and artificial intelligence on tree care.
• Ethical implications of ‘smart approaches’ to arboriculture and urban forestry.

We invite articles that fall under any of the following types:

• Original Articles. Original fundamental or applied research that contributes to the scientific foundations that support the disciplines of arboriculture and urban forestry. Abstracts should be structured (Background, Methods, Results, and Conclusions) and are limited to 250 words. Original Articles should be no more than 8,000 words.
• Review Articles. These include literature reviews or syntheses of previous work that identify trends, designate areas for new work and/or theory development, and/or compare competing theories. Abstracts should be unstructured and are limited to 250 words. Review Articles should be no more than 10,000 words.
• Short Communications. Appropriate for original research investigations that report preliminary or novel results on limited data sets, for analysis of procedures, equipment, or management systems that will lead to the improvement of best management practices, and for the introduction of novel theoretical perspectives. Short Communications should be no more than 5,000 words.

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