A content analysis of urban forest management plans in Canada: Changes in social-ecological objectives over time

Urban forests are a critical element of urban environmental planning. Greater awareness of the ecosystem services provided by urban forests over the last two decades has led to an increased interest in improving urban forest management. In Canada, the conditions of management are usually articulated by a municipal government in an urban forest management plan (UFMP). This study responds to previous studies on the content of Canadian UFMPs to provide a more comprehensive and updated comparison of UFMPs across Canada. While previous research has examined the content of UFMPs at a moment in time, and often when far fewer plans existed, in this study we consider changes in content over time and the influence of the social-ecological characteristics of municipalities on this content. We combined quantitative and qualitative content analyses, including topic modelling text analysis algorithms and interpretative thematic coding, to extract content, in the form of topics or themes, from 74 UFMPs. We assessed the distribution of these topics and themes by year of publication, and the influence of social-ecological characteristics upon this distribution using standard correlation and means differences analysis procedures. We found that Canadian UFMPs contain a broad number of themes and topics but are dominated by ideas referring to increasing tree abundance. Comparatively less attention is being paid to climate change and community stewardship. Mentions of increasing tree abundance and climate change rose over time. There was also a greater mention of administration, community education, and increasing tree abundance in smaller municipalities. Canadian municipalities may be well positioned to increase the abundance of urban forests given current management conditions. While abundance itself is beneficial, increasing abundance without addressing issues related to biodiversity, vulnerability of urban forests to climate change, and community stewardship, is a management trade-off that could, for example, increase abundance in the short term, but increase vulnerability in the long term. While focused on Canadian cities, this study also provides guidelines for possible cross-country comparisons and reflections on how UFMPs can be powerful management and planning tools for a climate-resilient and sustainable future.