Tenley M. Conway

University of Toronto | U of T · Department of Geography

Ecosystem services associated with urban forests have received significant consideration in the last decade, but less attention has been given to disservices. In the urban forest, examples of common disservices include air pollution, allergens and physical damage to property. The way perceived and experienced urban forest disservices influence resi...

Drivers at multiple scales influence the management of trees, grass and other vegetation in residential yards. While significant attention has been paid to the varied drivers of residential lawn care and herbaceous vegetation, less attention has been directed at urban tree management on residential property, particularly at the finer household-scal...

With the adoption of ambitious goals to grow and diversify the urban forest, municipal and non-municipal planting efforts have increased in many North American cities. A better understanding of the decisions made by those engaged in planting and supplying trees is needed to understand if and how municipal goals are being addressed, provide insight...

Urban forest patterns within cities are primarily governed by social factors such as neighborhood characteristics, municipal policy, and individual residents. While a growing body of literature has examined the influence of such factors on tree canopy extent, less attention has been given to other aspects of the urban forest, including tree density...

In recent years, many North American municipalities have adopted urban forest management plans. These plans typically include ambitious tree planting goals, with a focus on increasing native species' presence. Having a high percentage of native species can increase ecological integrity, but there are also benefits associated with planting non-nativ...

Many world cities want to expand the number of urban trees. How this expansion occurs should consider what people expect from trees based on how they experience and perceive these trees. Therefore, we need a better understanding of how people perceptually respond to urban tree abundance. This research examined whether people’s satisfaction with urb...

Many world cities want to expand the number of urban trees. How this expansion occurs should consider what people expect from trees based on how they experience and perceive these trees. Therefore, we need a better understanding of how people perceptually respond to urban tree abundance. This research examined whether people’s satisfaction with urb...

Across the world, planning and decision-making for urban forests increasingly seeks to include diverse perspectives. Yet, research on people’s perceptions of urban forests and urban trees is fragmented. To integrate and critically analyse this body of research, we conducted a review of empirical studies about people’s perceptions of urban forests a...

Green infrastructure (GI) refers to trees, rain gardens, rain barrels, and other features that address stormwater management, climate change and other challenges facing many cities. GI is often not equitably distributed across urban landscapes, making its benefits unevenly experienced. Cities have multiple initiatives focused on different types of...

Cities around the world are diverse. People’s perceptions of urban forests may vary according to urban contexts and people’s diverse identities. A better understanding of these diverse perceptions is critical to support stewardship initiatives, inform urban tree decisions, and guide community engagement, among other key management and governance pr...

The success of urban forestry depends on community support and engagement. How satisfied is the community with their urban trees is a useful way to understand these processes. However, public perception is complex and depends on a wide array of cognitive factors. How these factors relate and influence people’s level of satisfaction with urban trees...

Many municipalities are working to protect and grow their urban forest, including adopting private tree regulations. Such regulations typically require property-owners to apply for a permit to remove trees and, if the permit is granted, plant replacement trees. Even with such regulations, many private trees are removed each year, particularly on re...

Green infrastructure (GI) features in private residential outdoor space play a key role in expanding GI networks in cities and provide multiple co-benefits to people. However, little is known about residents’ intended behavior concerning GI in private spaces. Resident homeowners in Toronto (Ontario, Canada) voluntarily participated in an anonymous...

Green infrastructure (GI) initiatives, including programs to plant trees and install bioswales, have been adopted by a growing number of local government and non-governmental organizations. While the details of these programs vary, a common characteristic of most Canadian and US GI initiatives is a distributed approach that includes both public and...

As the world is increasingly urbanized, cities face critical challenges to supporting human wellbeing, biodiversity conservation, and climate resilience. Many of these challenges can be addressed by urban forest conservation and enhancement initiatives. Urban forests provide many ecosystem services, such as temperature regulation, increased wildlif...

Many world cities have plans to increase tree numbers and canopy cover. However, cities often struggle to articulate the social and ecological benefits of urban trees. Advances in experimental socio-ecological research are needed to understand the combined social and ecological benefits of urban trees. Experimentally measuring the ecological and so...

Urban forests, integral to a city’s critical infrastructure, are traditionally under the mandate of local governments, yet in reality, the decision-making for their conservation is influenced by a myriad of factors operating at the neighbourhood level. In some neighbourhoods, decisions are heavily influenced by formal Resident Associations (RAs). U...

The concept of green infrastructure has been rapidly adopted by several disciplines and is increasingly appearing in policy discussions. While the use of the term has recently expanded, there is no single definition of green infrastructure. To date most of the research examining green infrastructure in policy has occurred in Europe and the US, and...

The provision of ecosystem services is a prominent rationale for urban greening, and there is a prevailing mantra that 'trees are good'. However, understanding how urban trees contribute to sustainability must also consider disservices. In this perspective article, we discuss recent research on ecosystem disservices of urban trees, including infras...

Invasive species can spread to new landscapes through various anthropogenic factors and negatively impact urban ecosystems, societies, and economies. Public awareness is considered central to mitigating the spread of invasive species. News media contributes to awareness although it is unclear what messages are being communicated. We incorporated Fr...

While urban forests are often identified as part of climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies, less attention has been given to vulnerabilities urban trees may have to a changing climate and practitioners’ response to those vulnerabilities. Yet, current planting and management decisions will impact how urban forests fare under future clim...

As a global phenomenon, redevelopment in cities influences urban forest dynamics. This study explores the relationship between resident attitudes and tree removal, retention, and planting on redeveloped versus non-redeveloped private properties in Christchurch, New Zealand. Residents were surveyed via questionnaire between October 2016 and January...

Urban redevelopment influences urban forests, with consequences for ecosystem service provision. Better understanding the effect of redevelopment on trees in cities can improve management and inform policy, thus having positive effects on ecosystem service provision and human wellbeing. This study quantified the effect of residential property redev...

Many North American municipalities are developing management plans to guide major investments in their urban forest. These efforts reflect a recent shift in urban forest management, towards ecosystem service provisioning and ecological integrity. The objective of this short communication is to examine how municipal urban forestry plans balance ecos...

Land use plans are widely used to guide urban development, which in turn can impact the magnitude, diversity and spatial distribution of ecosystem services that occur within urban areas. However, few studies have assessed whether ecosystem services have been included in land use plans. The purpose of this paper is to present a case study of the ten...

The effects of urbanization on the urban forest canopy cover has received significant consideration at broad scales, but little research has explored redevelopment-related influences on individual tree removal at a property scale. This study explores the effect of residential property redevelopment on individual trees in Christchurch, New Zealand....

Urban municipalities across North America are developing policies to protect and manage not only public trees but also the numerous trees located on private property. One approach is the creation of private tree by-laws or ordinances that regulate tree removal on all private property through a permitting process. These regulations can successfully...

Urban food forests are woody perennial food producing species intentionally planted and managed for their food products. Research and public interest in urban food forests is increasing in Canada, yet their place in municipal urban forest management is unclear. To better understand how urban food forests intersect with current urban forest manageme...

Urban forests are increasingly acknowledged as important areas for producing ecosystem services and maintaining ecosystem processes. In response, municipalities throughout North America have been adopting long-term plans to support strategic management of the urban forest. These plans have the potential to shape the urban forest for decades to come...

en As suggested by Ashmore and Dodson (2016), emphasis on urban physical geography would contribute to deeper understandings about the Anthropocene, while supporting the management of more livable cities and suburbs. Urban physical geography can look to urban ecology for conceptual models that will support exploration of urban areas as unique socio...

Key Messages Local news coverage of urban forests in three Ontario newspapers frames trees as providers of both ecosystem services and disservices. Local coverage differed between newspapers in municipalities with and without other urban forest actors present. A major ice storm shifted how newspapers covered urban forests, increasing the number of...

In the past decade, municipalities across North America have increased investment in their urban forests in an effort to maintain and enhance the numerous benefits provided by them. Some municipalities have now drafted long-term urban forest management plans that emphasize the planting of native trees, to improve ecological integrity, and participa...

Urban forests represent a valuable resource for cities but are not without costs. These costs can include time, money, and the loss of beneficial services as results of pest infestations. Knowledge of an urban forest's tree species composition and vulnerability to pests is needed to help managers enhance services delivered, while minimizing expense...

In urban areas, the pattern of trees is often a result of municipal policy, built form, neighborhood socioeconomic conditions, and the actions of local actors. Recent research has focused on the role of neighborhood socioeconomics, and begun to explore the underlying causes of uneven distributions of urban forests associated with different socioeco...

Cities across North America are adopting ambitious goals to grow their urban forests. As existing trees and new planting opportunities are often located on private property, residents’ support and participation is needed in order to meet these goals. However, little research has examined support for municipal urban forestry efforts, including polic...

Recent research has focused on the ways urban forest patterns vary in relation to level of urbanization and socioeconomic characteristics, with most studies limited to one urban land use type or multiple non-differentiate land uses. Additionally, the majority of studies examining urban forest patterns focus on canopy cover extent, with less attenti...

Exurban development, characterized by low-density residential development, is one of the leading anthropogenic causes of land transformation. A major obstacle to studying this phenomenon is a lack of spatially explicit data. In this article, two commonly employed indirect approaches that use readily available road and census data as surrogates of e...

To further our understanding of invasive species’ novel distributions, knowledge of invasive species’ relationships with environmental variables at multiple spatial scales is paramount. Here, we investigate which environmental variables and which spatial scales best explain the invasive mute swan’s (Cygnus olor) distribution in southern Ontario (Ca...

Background/Question/Methods The relationship between a species and the landscape can differ between its native and non-native ranges due to different competitors, resource availability and climates. For prediction purposes however, it is pertinent to use native range relationships to inform distribution models in the non-native range. Our study e...

The future of many species appears bleak with the realization that continued urbanization and climate change will have significant effects on the earth's ecosystems by changing water cycles, habitat availability and inter-species dynamics, among other effects. Invasive species are likely to thrive in these changing disturbed ecosystems due to their...

Biogeographers have developed a new generation of statistical models called presence-only models, which require no data concerning the absence of a species and do not assume that the absence of a species indicates habitat unsuitability. Both characteristics are especially useful when modeling a species that is actively spreading across a landscape....

Urban forests provide a range of environmental, social, economic and health benefits, but because the distribution of canopy cover is uneven across many metropolitan areas, there is unequal access to the benefits. While recent work has documented the socioeconomic factors correlated with uneven distributions – including neighborhood wealth, presenc...

Exurban development, characterized by low density residential development, is one of the leading anthropogenic causes of land transformation. A major hindrance to studying this phenomenon is a lack of spatially explicit data. In this paper, we explore a simple method based on NDVI recoding of SPOT 5 imagery (10 m resolution) to delineate exurban bu...

A recent focus of land use/land cover research is the design and validation of spatially explicit predictive models. An often overlooked aspect of model development is the role of class resolution. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of changing the number and breadth of land use classes on a model’s calibration and predictions. T...

New Urbanism is often presented as an improvement over conventional suburban development along economic, social, and environmental lines. While the economic and social claims of New Urbanism have been investigated, relatively little work has examined the potential environmental impacts of New Urbanism as compared with conventional forms of suburban...

Purpose – The ecological footprint represents a simple way to assess the amount of materials consumed and waste produced by a given entity. The approach has been applied to countries, towns, households, and more recently university campuses. One of the challenges of using the ecological footprint at a university is the difficulty of determining how...

The greater availability of remotely sensed high-resolution imagery and advances in object-oriented analysis have created more opportunities for automated urban land-use classifications. To date, few studies have attempted to classify land use from satellite imagery using object-oriented approaches, and those that have tend to rely on manual digiti...

Impervious surface is often used as an indicator of non-point source pollution in urban areas due to the strong relationship between percent impervious surface cover and water-quality impacts. In many cases, a threshold effect exists where water quality rapidly degrades above a given percent cover, but the exact threshold level appears to vary acro...

Urban forest conditions are driven by a range of biophysical and social factors, including urban form, socioeconomic conditions, and municipal policy. However, relatively little attention has been paid to policies, particularly those aimed at private property. The purpose of this study was to identify the types of urban tree policies that exist in...

Greenbelts are networks of managed land adopted to meet a wide array of ecological and other goals. In 2005, a greenbelt was created in southern Ontario (Canada). This paper examines the potential for success of the 2005 initiative by evaluating the greenbelt in the light of several weaknesses identified in Ontario's previous greenbelt initiative....

Recent epistemological shifts in environmental geography have created a space to consider the interactions between ecological and urban systems more seriously. While openness to thinking about urban ecosystems has increased in recent years, there remain fundamental gaps in our knowledge. For example, recent research has examined the impact of urban...

Green space protection is often used to counteract the ecological impacts of urban development. There is growing evidence, however, that protecting patches of green space will not ensure long-term sustainability of ecological conditions unless connections between patches are also maintained. In North America, very few residentially dominated region...

Insight into future land use and effective ways to control land-use change is crucial to addressing environmental change. A variety of growth-control policies have been adopted by municipal and regional governments within the United States to try to minimize the ecological impact of continued urbanization, but it is often unclear if those policies...

Land use models provide a way to examine the impacts of future urbanization and alternative land use regulations on the environment before irreversible changes are made. A simple spatially-explicit model was used to explore potential build-out conditions under different sets of regulations for the Barnegat Bay watershed, New Jersey, USA. Four build...

<?tlsb=-.01w>Recent urban development along the US coasts has negatively impacted the local environment, <?tlsb><?tws><?tlss>and these impacts will only increase thanks to rapid regional population growth. Empirical spatially disaggregate land-use models provide a way to explore future conditions and environmental impacts before irreversible change...

"Graduate Program in Geography." Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2004. Includes abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 252-269).

Natural and cultural characteristics at seaward boundaries of residential lots are examined to identify ways of making these boundaries more naturally functioning. Field data on lot size, house size, type and location of the seaward-most vertical structure, and window height are compared with topography and vegetation on the backdune, foredune, for...

Mormoopidae is a small family of Neotropical microchiropteran bats that includes two genera (Mormoops and Pteronotus) and ten species, two of which are known only from fossils. Mormoopidae is typically classified as a member of Noctilionoidea, a group that minimally includes two other Neotropical families (Phyllostomidae and Noctilionidae) and may...

"Masters of Science in the Geography Department." Thesis (M.S.)--Rutgers University, 2001. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-129).