Urban and Community Forestry in the Northeast

During the latter part of 2004, Helen Buitenkamp of Springer Publishing emailed me that the first edition of Handbook of Urban and Community Forestry in the Northeast is the best volume in its field and inquired whether we’d be interested in compiling a second edition; I replied that we certainly would, and started working on it imme- ately. We have revised 14 out of 26 chapters in the first edition, and added two new authors. Many things in urban forestry have changed a great deal, while others have not changed at all. Henry Gerhold has written an entirely new Chapter 1 based on a book that he and his graduate student Stacy Franks have written entitled “Our Heritage of Community Trees. ”Dave Nowak has included the most up-to-date inf- mation on the environmental effects of trees in Chapter 2, and Peter Fengler and Tom Smiley have done the same with the diagnosis and treatment of hazard trees in Chapter 17. All told, we have revised or replaced 16 chapters of the original 26; we’ve kept 10 chapters as originally written, and substituted two entirely new chapters, 1 and 14, respectively. With the emergence of urban and community forestry as the fastest growing part of our profession in the last several years, the need for a book such as this inevitably developed. The Society of American Foresters’ urban forestry working group counts over 40 universities now offering courses in this subject, and the number is growing.