Multifaceted green areas and forests in changing cities: insights for a socio-ecological evaluation improvement

Urban green spaces (UGS) are continuously developed around the world to deliver multiple benefits. Among UGS, urban forests (UF) planning may be driven by a broad range of benefits such as the need for climate change adaptation, the preservation and creation of habitats, or to enhance people’s connection to nature. Socio-ecological research on UF inherently embraces an interdisciplinary approach to provide insight into cities multidimensional patterns and processes. But the miss-matching between social and ecological observations can create ambiguity in the development and use of clear indicators for sustainable planning. We present an interdisciplinary reflection on socio-ecological research of UF to investigate the socio-cultural dimension in a more epistemologically and methodologically accurate manner respect to the current literature. Indeed, this latter suffers from some important gaps concerning a) lack of balanced engagement of colleagues from different fields; b) limited time to explore new approaches due to research-related time constraints; c) lack of qualitative bottom-up approaches; d) fully integrated analysis of socio-ecological data. Starting from the essential background information, we propose that the system itself should inform methodological approaches with the aim to avoid over-reductionist research and top-down production of knowledge. Moreover, as socio-ecological systems are highly dynamic, the use of multiple spatial and temporal scales can help in strengthening socio-ecological evidence. The implementation of a combined set of socio-ecological variables and indicators within a clear interdisciplinary and bottom-up methodological framework should help in improving future socio-ecological studies and enhance their comparability across cities. We therefore call for an improved understanding of the benefits of socio-ecological approaches, bringing people together to share their knowledge and develop further common protocols.