Dear IUFRO Division 6 colleagues,

We are looking for contributions for a special issue of the journal Arboriculture and Urban Forestry, on the topic of “Smart Urban Forestry—Digital technologies and data for planning, design, and management”

Cities are increasingly data-driven, and there is a growing interest in understanding how citizen engagement, connected technology, and data analytics can support sustainable development. Evidence has also repeatedly shown that green infrastructure such as urban forests address diverse urban challenges and are critical components of urban sustainability and resilience. It is thus timely to assess the role of urban forests and other green spaces in smart city planning. As technology becomes more ubiquitous in urban environments, and as pressure to maximize green benefits for all city dwellers rises, it is worthwhile for researchers and practitioners to consider associated challenges, opportunities, and implications for tree care and urban forest management. This special issue of AUF addresses current knowledge gaps by exploring how the planning, design, management, and use of urban trees, urban forests, and green infrastructure can be integrated into smart city planning. It will look at how digital technologies can be jointly used as tools to improve the delivery of forest benefits and enable stakeholder participation and engagement, for example, through citizen science.

Contributions to this special issue can cover one or more of the following topics:

• Understanding data quality for urban trees: technological challenges and opportunities.
• New technologies for data collection and data sharing in urban forestry: mobile applications, web

• dashboards, remote sensing tools and methods (unmanned aerial vehicles, ground-based sensors, etc).

• Data-driven coproduction of urban forestry knowledge by scientists, managers, and the public.
• Novel sources of data and new methods for arboricultural and urban forestry research.
• Uses for and implications of open data in arboricultural and urban forestry research.
• The role of smartphones and other mobile devices: volunteered geospatial information for

• design, planning, and management.

• The impact of automation and artificial intelligence on tree care.
• Ethical implications of ‘smart approaches’ to arboriculture and urban forestry.

Abstracts are due April 15^th and full papers June 1^st. Further details are provided in the attachment.

Kind regards,

Sophie Nitoslawski and Cecil Konijnendijk, guest editors

(Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia)