User Guide for CUFIM, the Community and Urban Forest Inventory and Management Program

摘要

The purpose of this study is to help communities manage their urban forests specifically in relation to the potential use of woody biomass rather than the more traditional and costly practice of disposal.This study builds on two previous studies that provided the foundation and direction for this effort. The Elements of Sustainability in Urban Forestry by Richard Thompson, Norman Pillsbury and Richard Hanna (1994) examined urban forestry in California and identified the elements necessary for sustainability to occur. This study also motivated the development of urban tree volume equations (Tree Volume Equations for Fifteen Urban Species in California by Norman Pillsbury, Jeffrey Reimer and Richard Thompson,1998) where detailed estimates of the biomas spotential for various urban species is now possible. Presented here is CUFIM, the Community and Urban Forest Inventory and Management program,a new Excel-based computer program that allows urban foresters control over their tree inventory. It also allows unprecedented options to determine volume of anticipated tree removals, and estimates of their dollar value. This program allows users to store and maintainup to 500 tree species and 50,000 tree records. Each record contains the following fields: Tree sequence number, tree record number, species code, removal status, species name, species group,tree dbh, tree height, tree volume including abreakdown of volume by branch diameter size,and 10 user-defined variables that can be easily inputted by the user. Each species that is added to the database is also assigned a species group code. This is used to calculate tree volume information. CUFIM comes with 19 built-in species groups, and allows for a total of 50 groups by the user. If new species groups are to be entered, their local or standard volume coefficients must also be entered as described in this report.