Workshop on analysis of results in Parque La Ceiba
Barriers to Further Use
The need for a tree inventory, and calculation of
corresponding environmental services, is recognized
by many people in México. Some even suggest that
the inventories should be a legal requirement in
cities with more than 100,000 citizens. Managers
of environmental departments have long recog-
nized the need for proper tree management, but
it was not until I started to do inventories that
cities saw a more systematic approach as pos-
sible. This gap I attribute to several issues:
• First, using statistics and sampling to portray
a tree population can be a concept hard to
grasp. On a funny note, there was a senior
officer in one environmental ministry that
wanted to do a complete inventory of a major
city in México with well over 3 million trees. I
could not convince her that sampling was the
realistic and statistically sound approach!
• Second, there is a pervasive belief that i-Tree
Eco is a GIS program, rather than a data col-
lection and processing software. GIS programs
have a reputation of being "too complex," so
most people do not bother to learn more.
• Third, because tree inventory skills haven't
yet been honed or even introduced in many
cities, managers cannot envision the task, and
therefore they prefer not to talk about it.
• Fourth, there are no urban foresters, even
in big cities, that could carry out some of
the recommendations of tree manage-
ment derived from the inventory, so this
is a huge setback to using the tool. >>
www.urban-forestry.com 35
