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Canada
With over 75% of Canadians in urban areas, urban forests play an important role in the daily lives of Canadian citizens. Urban forests provide numerous environmental and health benefits to the people of Canada. Over time, the use of urban forestry in Canada has changed. Erik Jorgeson first coined the term while teaching forest pathology at the University of Toronto. However, after this milestone in the urban forestry community, urban forestry faded to the background with few accounts of urban forestry being practiced. As urban forestry started gaining recognition globally and the importance of urban forestry was realized, Canada began creating Urban Forest Management Plans (UFMPs). These plans focus on maintenance, improving canopy cover, enhancing tree species diversity, and educational programs, without focus on economic or environmental services urban forests provide. Today, Canada is conducting studies to address the gaps within their urban forestry programs. Because urban forestry is practiced under different departments, labels, and disciplines, the true extent of urban forestry in Canada is unknown. A study at the University of Toronto hopes to assess the extent of urban forestry across the country to better assist and aid municipalities practicing urban forestry.

University of Toronto
The University of Toronto during the 1960’s was home to some of the greatest forest pathology names of the decade; most prominently Dr. Erik Jorgensen, who eventually coined the oxymoronic term “urban forestry” while assisting a master’s student with his curriculum. The talents of two professors at the university (Dr. Jorgensen, and media professor Marshall McLuhan), combined with the crisis of Dutch Elm Disease ravaging the 90% elm monoculture at the university, and elms abroad, gave the duo the motivation, and the catalyst to pioneer the discipline of “urban forestry”. What made this new discipline different from prior urban tree management strategies was the sense of scale. Prior to the 1960’s urban trees were managed on a tree-by-tree basis. The Dutch Elm Disease finally convinced forest pathologists at the school to consider the urban forest on an interconnected system level, where small changes can create massive bull-whip effects if not properly managed. This thinking was essential for Jorgensen and his team to battle Dutch Elm Disease, and, in 1962, gave them a convincing enough argument to secure start-up funding for the world’s first “Shade Tree Research Laboratory” in an old Borden dairy plant that the university owned (“shade tree” was a common phrasing for urban trees at the time). By 1965 the University of Toronto had its first official urban forestry course, called “the Study of Urban Forestry”, taught by Dr. Jorgensen. Only one year later department head Dean Sisam applied the term to the previously known courses of “arboriculture and parks management”, three years following that the university began creating diplomas for urban forestry; producing seven graduates by 1982. The University of Toronto’s program has continued and has grown significantly into current times, inspiring many other institutions to offer a similar diploma as the discipline diffused across the globe.

Erik Jorgensen
Erik Jorgensen began as a forest pathologist for the federal government in Denmark where he then moved to Toronto in 1959 to begin studies on Dutch Elm Disease (DED), which at the time was spreading through North America at extreme rates and killing thousands of Elm trees in its path. He was a professor of Forest Pathology at the University of Toronto throughout the 1960s. It was here where Jorgensen innovated the term “Urban Forestry”. In 1965 he was helping a graduate student come up with a name for his study on the success and failures of municipal tree planting projects due to disease. The term was slow to catch on but began to proliferate during the late 60’s when issues of forestry and disease were significant. While being interviewed for a newspaper article in 1969 he defined Urban Forestry as “a specialized branch that has as its objective the cultivation and management of city trees.” He continued his career at the University of Toronto and his laboratory became the first one devoted to shade tree research in Canada. Jorgensen continued to define and justify the importance of Urban Forestry through his conference papers published in the Shade Tree Research Laboratory throughout the 70’s and 80’s. He ended up leaving the University in 1973 to lead a National Urban Forestry program in Ottawa, Canada.