The urban forest faces multiple challenges in the coming years. Maintaining tree-based resources in cities remains a constant challenge requiring permanent innovation, a situation complicated by emerging applications for urban forestry and greenspace in areas of densification, climate adaptation, biodiversity, health & well-being and the energy transition. To effectively deal with these challenges and demands, the body of knowledge on urban forestry in the Netherlands and internationally needs to develop rapidly. To this end, the Urban Forestry research group focusses on several critical themes in fundamental and applied research: Tree Architecture, Urban Forest Syntax, Data & Tools for Green Infrastructure, Urban Forest(ry) History, Forest Urbanism, Urban Forest Care, and Mobile Urban Forestry.

The theme Tree Architecture centers around research into the physical form and morphology of trees, and the relationship between these characteristics and ecosystem services such as cooling. Current projects in this include the ‘Urban Climate Grove’ and the now fore-runner to this project, the ‘Urban Climate Arboreta’.

In Urban Forest Syntax the group explores how urban trees and woodland give shape, structure and meaning to cities, from the scale of the individual tree to the tree configurations, wooded ensembles and city forest systems. The aim is to generate insight into the typologies and morphologies inherent in the urban forest mosaic to better understand its complexities and the related possibilities for afforestation efforts. Current projects include ‘Atlas of the Urban Forest Delft’ and ‘De Bomentaal van Rotterdam Zuid’.

Research under the banner of Data & Tools for Green Infrastructure develops metrics and tools on ecosystem services such as microclimate amelioration and novel applications for arborists, engineers, designers and urban tree managers to transfer metrics into built environment solutions. The major project currently undertaken around this theme is the ‘i-Tree-2.0-NL’ project, a Top-sector project with a large number of institutional and industry partners focusing on tree cooling metrics, tree growth curves and tool development of i-Tree.

In the theme History of the Urban Forest we delve into how trees and cities have been co-evolving and co-constituting one another in the past, to gain a deeper insight into urban human-forest relationships and their past and future use and management. The ‘Atlas of the Urban Forest Delft’ includes a large section looking into the history of lowland city greenspace.

Urban Forest Care focuses on how the urban forest is developed and managed, exploring current practices and paradigms and how they might be advanced in the context of the notion of Care and broader goals around sustainable cities. Resident-tree and resident-resident interactions, place-making and spatial transformation processes are also part of this theme. A number of projects are currently running in this theme, including ‘Bos-op-Poten Handelsplein’, ‘Bos-op-Poten Dordrecht, ‘Bos-op-Poten Oud- Mathenesse’, and the PhD research of Lea Hartmeyer entitled ‘The Urban Forest as an Infrastructure of Care: Tracing networks and places of care in and around Urban Forest provision and management through Living Lab action research’.

The more technical aspects of temporary urban woodland installations is investigated under the umbrella of Mobile Urban Forestry looking into the potentials and constraints of above-ground ‘forestry’ and how mobile urban trees can act as dynamic agents in fast-tracking urban greening and transitioning to new models of Care. Research and innovation projects in this theme build on the insights and prototypes from the ‘Urban Climate Arboreta’ project and are now being developed and tested further in projects like ‘Bos-op-Poten Handelsplein’.

Finally, the transferal and application the above knowledge is advanced through explorations and speculations under the banner of Forest Urbanism, conceptualized in trajectories such as ‘Wooded Commons’, ‘Climate Arboreta’, ‘Novel Urban Ecosystems’, ‘Circular Regio-polis’ and ‘Biocities of the Future’.