Public values associated with urban forests: Synthesis of findings and lessons learned from emerging methods and cross-cultural case studies

Understanding how urban nature is important to the public can broaden management objectives and give citizens a say in how nature is managed in the places where they live. However, studies on the topic do not usually integrate multiple research methods: and case studies, or have an opportunity to reflect on an understanding of the value-elicitation process, which is vital for strengthening future research. This article synthesizes multiple qualitative and quantitative research studies that focused on developing an understanding of how the public values the urban forest. Investigating urban-forest public values provides opportunities to understand how the public assigns importance to urban nature in a context where the benefits of nature to humans are less tangible. The studies took place in four Canadian and three Colombian cities, and elicited values from 1289 participants and respondents with the use of field tours, personal diaries, focus groups, photoelicitation, interviews, and side-walk interception surveys. The synthesis presented here merged the value codes from all case studies to develop a general framework of urban forest public values, and analysed the relationship between the value codes, case studies, and research methods, using qualitative and quantitative meta-analysis techniques. By integrating these rich data sets, we reveal the complex structure of the aesthetic, ecological, economic, environmental, health, psychological, and socio-cultural ideas that these members of the public associate with the urban forest. The quantitative research methods in our studies mostly elicited aesthetic and environmental values, while the qualitative methods elicited all types of values, while enriching descriptions of psycho-social and natural-ecological values. Future research on public values associated with nature can be strengthened by deepening the natural experience of participants, and by using open-ended and collective valueelicitation mechanisms.