Grading of parameters for urban tree inventories by city officials, arborists, and academics using the delphi method.

Tree inventories are expensive to conduct and update, so every inventory carried out must be maximized. However, increasing the number of constituent parameters increases the cost of performing and updating the inventory, illustrating the need for careful parameter selection. This article reports the results of a systematic expert rating of tree inventories aiming to quantify the relative importance of each parameter. Using the Delphi method, panels comprising city officials, arborists, and academics rated a total of 148 parameters. The total mean score, the top ranking parameters, which can serve as a guide for decision-making at practical level and for standardization of tree inventories, were: Scientific name of the tree species and genera, Vitality, Coordinates, Hazard class, and Identification number. The study also examined whether the different responsibilities and usage of urban tree databases among organizations and people engaged in urban tree inventories affected their prioritization. The results revealed noticeable dissimilarities in the ranking of parameters between the panels, underlining the need for collaboration between the research community and those commissioning, administrating, and conducting inventories. Only by applying such a transdisciplinary approach to parameter selection can urban tree inventories be strengthened and made more relevant.

Liked, disliked and unseen forest attributes: relation to modes of viewing and cognitive constructs.

There is broad agreement that in determination of preferences the spatial configurations and content-based properties of the landscape interact with each other and with cognitive constructive. This interaction and how it is influenced by changes in landscape appearance was explored here in a site-specific context where 32 respondents took their own photos of liked and disliked attributes while walking a pre-defined trail of 2 km through a recreational forest landscape with extensive variation in landscape appearance and management regimes. Each respondent provided five photos of features that contributed positively to their landscape experiences and five that contributed negatively and recorded the location and reason in a photo-log, resulting in a total of 320 photos and photo-log pairs. Photos of content-based attributes were more frequent than photos of the landscape's spatial organisation. Photos in the spatial configuration domain were dominated by liked attributes, while the content-based domain was dominated by disliked attributes. Subtle details and ephemera events constituted a large share of the captured content-based attributes, indicating that they are equally important for on-site experience of landscape character and attractiveness as larger landscape elements and their spatial organisation. Closer examination showed marked differences in the relative distribution of spatial and content-based properties between forested and open landscape units. In forested units content-based attributes dominated, while in the open unit photos motivated by the spatial configurations in the implied space dominated. We concluded therefore that changes in depth of the perceptible space alter the relative importance of spatial and content-based properties for people's visual landscape perception, and thus the type of attributes that pass through the individual's perceptual and cognitive filters and become decisive in determining preferences.