Cambridge City Council’s i-Tree Eco study will value the city’s urban forest

As part of the Cambridge Canopy Project, with funding support from the Interreg 2 Seas Programme NSC project, an i-Tree Eco study for the city will be conducted.

The i-Tree Tools i-Tree Eco package ‘quantifies the structure of, threats to, and benefits and values provided by forest populations’, including urban forests, such as Cambridge’s. It will be used to survey a sample of the entire tree population in the city, providing estimates for air pollution removal, carbon sequestration and storage, hydrological effects including avoided run-off, interception, and transpiration, and building energy effects. Only a small handful of UK cities have run i-Tree studies like this, so it’s a high-profile process for the project to be carrying out and will provide important and valuable information for the city. The outputs of the study will help to inform not only tree management decisions in the city, but also to help provide the case for greater investment in, and use of, trees as green infrastructure solutions going forwards. Cambridge City Council will be working with Treeconomics and Forest Research to conduct the study, and will collaborate with staff and students from Anglia Ruskin University to help undertake the survey component.