The future urban forest: a survey of tree planting programs in the Northeastern United States

Cities around the world are pursuing tree planting as a way to increase tree cover. Despite the growing interest in planting trees as a way to offset climate change, counter the negative impacts of urbanization, and provide benefits to city dwellers, there has not been a recent effort to quantify the number of trees being planted nor the species composition of these plantings. Because ecosystem services and ecosystem threats can transcend municipal boundaries, understanding trends in tree planting at multiple spatial scales is critical. To overcome this knowledge gap, we used a survey to collate recent tree planting data from 52 cities with populations greater than 50,000 people in the Northeastern USA. The four largest cities in our study (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C.) planted over 87% of all the trees that were planted in the region. Smaller cities, which are numerous in region, planted proportionally fewer trees and, in over 40% of the small cities surveyed, planti...