PS 27-130 - CANCELLED - Urban tree diversity and social vulnerability: a quantitative look at the relationship between ecological and social variables and review of existing literature

Abstract: Vulnerability to the impacts of future climate and environmental changes remains a critical issue in fully understanding the influence of our changing planet. There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that exposure to urban biodiversity can have positive effects on human mental and physical health, but there is limited research exploring the nexus between urban tree diversity and social vulnerability in the United States. Social vulnerability refers to the susceptibility of the health and well-being of communities to multiple acute or chronic negative external stressors. In a literature review using WoS and Scopus, the authors found only one Canadian paper that investigated the direct relationship between functional urban forests and social vulnerability. In this study, we used CDC/ATSDR’s Social Vulnerability Index as a proxy for the overall wellbeing of communities at the ZCTA level in San Francisco, California. The Social Vulnerability Index uses 16 unique social condition variables such as unemployment, crowding, and educational attainment to rank a community's vulnerability to environmental events such as a natural disaster or pandemics. To quantify urban tree diversity, we relied on multi-year iNaturalist observations collected in the city's boundaries. We indexed urban tree diversity by finding the proportion of species richness to total number of observations in each ZCTA and dichotomized urban tree diversity into "not diverse" and "diverse". To determine a statistical relationship between urban tree diversity and SVI, we performed a logistic regression analysis and our preliminary findings likely indicate that areas with higher social vulnerability tend to not have a "diverse" urban tree presence. With these findings, we show that there may be a relationship between the presence of urban tree diversity and social vulnerability. The intentions of this study are to highlight the lack of research observing human wellbeing and urban tree diversity and provide evidence as to why it is a crucial starting point for understanding how to develop more equitable urban landscapes.