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Urban forests are important components of societal interactions with nature. We focused on urban forest patches, a distinct and underexplored subset of the urban forest that spans land uses and ownerships, and requires silvicultural practices to address their unique biophysical characteristics and management regimes. Our goal was to elucidate multi-scalar urban forest patch governance arrangements as they translated to on-the-ground management in four urban areas (Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore) within the eastern United States. A transdisciplinary knowledge co-production framework was used to guide identification of the prominent management challenge or dilemma motivating change to forest patch management in each location, and to describe the dynamic interplay of decision-making and governance processes across locations as they advanced toward desired forest conditions. A common management goal existed across all four locations: multi-age, structurally complex forests dominated by regionally native species. Ecological and social concerns affected by local context and city capacity served as starting points prompting management action and new collaborations. Disparate governance arrangements including top-down municipal resources, regional conservation facilitated by landowners, and grass-roots community-driven stewardship led to diverse support-building processes and innovative strategies that served as forces initiating and shaping new management actions. Science and iterative learning and adaptation influenced change in all locations, reinforcing new management arrangements and practices. Among the four study areas, the earliest management of urban forest patches started in the 1980 s, historically lacking embeddedness in urban forest management more broadly, and experiencing challenges with integration into existing governance infrastructure. Ultimately, new management and governance approaches to urban forest patches in all four study areas have evolved uniquely and organically, driven by place-based historical legacies and ongoing socio-ecological feedbacks. The generalization of findings for broader urban forest management guidelines, such as for trees and park, would lead to misguided outcomes.

We introduce a conceptual model of the urban forest patch as a complex social-ecological system, incorporating cross-scale interactions. We developed this model through an interdisciplinary process engaging social and ecological scientists and urban land management decision makers, with a focus on temperate forest social-ecological systems. In this paper, we place the production and management of urban forest patches in historical perspective, present a conceptual model of urban forest patches within a broader regional context, and identify a series of research questions to highlight future directions for research on urban forest patches. This conceptual model identifies how spatial and temporal social-ecological drivers interact with patch-level conditions at multiple scales. Our integrative approach can provide insights into the role of social-ecological drivers in shaping forest health, biodiversity, and benefits forest patches provide to people in urban and urbanizing regions, with direct implications for decision-making to improve management outcomes.

Streamside forests of urbanizing coastal regions lie at the nexus of global changes: rising sea levels, increasing storm surge, expanding urban development, and invasive species. To understand how these combined stressors affect forest conditions, we identified forest patches adjacent to urban land, analyzed adjacent land cover, modeled forest inundation, and sampled 100 sites across the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay watersheds. We found that the majority of forest patches are adjacent to urban land and projected flooding will affect 8–19% of regional forested land. We observed non-native invasive plants in 94% of forest plots. Trees were predominantly native, but over half of shrub stems were invasive species and more than 80% of plots contained invasive woody vines. Disturbance of human origin was correlated with abundance of invasive trees. Signs of deer activity were common. Richness and number of growth forms of invasive plants were related to adjacent agricultural land cover. These data reveal that streamside forests are impacted by the interacting stressors of urbanization, climate change, and invasive species spread. Our results emphasize the importance of protection and restoration of forests in urban regions and point to the need for a social-ecological systems approach to improve their condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]