The discipline of forestry can be traced back to 15th century Europe, and, for much of the intervening period, forestry has concerned itself primarily with the production of wood products. However, during the 20th century, people began to place more value on non-timber forest outputs such as clean water, recreation, and wildlife habitat. These changing values have been reflected in changes in forest management policy and practices. For example, the last 20 years have seen a precipitous decline in the volume of timber harvested from public lands in the U.S. (Warren, 2006). These changing values have made it more difficult to demonstrate the benefits of forest management, as, in contrast to wood products, many non-timber forest outputs do not have an established market price. One sub-discipline of forestry, which deals exclusively in non-timber forest outputs, is urban forestry. The need to demonstrate the benefits of urban forestry is particularly acute, because the costs of urban forestry, on a per-tree basis, are orders of magnitude higher than non-urban forestry (Maco and McPherson, 2003)
Keywords: street trees, shade, economic benefit, urban forestry, hedonic price equation