Forms, Functions and Values of Treescapes (Natural and Urban)

Dear Colleagues,

Treescapes are environments and landscapes in which trees play a major role. These types of environments can be found within forests, as well as in agricultural and urban areas. Treescapes offer a variety of social, economic, and environment benefits to the community, such as resilience to climate change through carbon sequestration and flood attenuation, improved health outcomes, increasing property values, supporting agriculture, providing habitats, and benefiting biodiversity.

Recent reports from the IPCC confirmed the need to remove fossil fuels from our economy, but in order to reduce CO₂ in the atmosphere, it is necessary to put much more carbon back into the landscape. To achieve this, more plant matter and more soil carbon are needed; and, consequently, this means more trees, which are considered an essential part of urban infrastructure and are crucial to the liveability and economic and environmental sustainability of cities.

However, considering the modern urban–rural interface, land development is more frequently linked to a decrease in trescapee areas. Continuous urban development targets land of open spaces, and puts the preservation and conservation of ecosystems at risk, as well as urban sustainability. It is therefore extremely important to provide a better understanding of these changing dynamics, and to clearly support the protection of these environments that can provide long-term resiliency to climate change.

This Special Issue is set up to receive research papers investigating the forms, functions, and values of treescapes across the world, with the aim of identifying opportunities, barries, and feasible possibilities for expansion of these types of landscapes, making the entire world more resilient to climate change. This Special Issue is open to experimental, numerical, theoretical and studies, as well as field works.

Dr. Matteo Rubinato
Dr. Craig Lashford
Prof. Sophia Shuang Chen
Guest Editors

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• landscaping
• urban greenery
• urban ecology
• public space
• flood management
• sustainable agriculture
• flow reduction
• climate change
• forestry
• treescapes