Epsilon Open Archive

Abstract

In 2009, FoMA began its funding of various projects to establish a national standard for urban tree inventories in order to aid urban tree planners and professionals within green space management in conducting consistent tree inventories. A national tree inventory standard was created in 2012 (Swedish Tree Inventory Standard, STIS), which was updated in 2015. At that time call was made, encouraging the tree management organisations to upload their local data to a global database called Curio. The purpose of this evaluation has been twofold: 1) based on STIS, to present and analyse the Swedish inputs to the Curio database, and 2) to assess to which degree STIS and experiences from the Curio database can be used to include a broader perspective than urban trees, in order to also perform long-term monitoring of urban green spaces, e.g. to be used in future development of descriptions of the Swedish green sector. It is concluded, that the ambition to create a national standard for urban tree inventorying has proven to be successful, and STIS is now frequently referred to in Swedish outsourcing documents and contracts. However, in its current form, the Curio database does not provide an optimal foundation for national monitoring of urban trees. The data set is too small to be nationally representative. Envisioning total inventories and relying on municipalities to provide data is not a sustainable approach in order to ensure longitudinal monitoring with given frequencies between updates and a baseline quality of the included data. It is recommended that FoMA and SLU provide a longitudinal spatial registration coupled with an assessment of the Swedish green sectors development. It is described how this can be done based on experiences from the STIS, and the latest Green Sector Description and SCB reports on urban spatial development.