Connecting with trees. Photo by Shane Rounce.
   

By Liz O’Brien, Stephen McConnachie, Clare Hall, Jack Forster, Alison Dyke, Vadim Saraev, and Glyn Jones.

Read the full paper here.

We have developed an approach to measuring the ways people in England value trees for social and cultural reasons. We found that people highly value trees both locally and nationally. Our approach can be used by organisations who make decisions about how to manage trees.  People value trees in their street, in parks, along footpaths, and in woodlands and forests for many different reasons. These reasons are often based on the relationships they have with them from visiting woods or enjoying nearby trees. We can consider some of these reasons to be social and cultural values and these can cover areas such as health and wellbeing, spiritual, aesthetic, historical, learning values and social connections. Much of what we know about these values is based on qualitative research, which provides rich detailed information but is not easily incorporated into decision-making processes. We have developed a way of putting numbers to our understanding.

We identified a set of nineteen statements used in previous research that cover the broad diversity of social and cultural values.  We tested these statements, then used them in a survey of 5,000 people in England. The survey accurately reflects the mix of age, gender, and region across England. We asked people to score how much they agreed with each statement. We first asked them to consider their local trees and woods and then to consider trees and woods across England. We also explored how these values might be impacted by a tree pest or disease that meant for example a woodland might be closed or trees needed to be felled on a large or small scale. We call our set of nineteen statements a ‘composite ‘measure of the social and cultural values of trees. It can be used by organisations such as local authorities or charities who want to explore these values with their local communities and to identify any changes over time as more trees are planted across the country.