During the latter part of 2004, Helen Buitenkamp of Springer Publishing
emailed me that the first edition of Handbook of Urban and Community
Forestry in the Northeast is the best volume in its field and inquired
whether we'd be interested in compiling a second edition; I replied that
we certainly would, and started working on it imme- ately. We have
revised 14 out of 26 chapters in the first edition, and added two new
authors. Many things in urban forestry have changed a great deal, while
others have not changed at all. Henry Gerhold has written an entirely
new Chapter 1 based on a book that he and his graduate student Stacy
Franks have written entitled "Our Heritage of Community Trees. "Dave
Nowak has included the most up-to-date inf- mation on the environmental
effects of trees in Chapter 2, and Peter Fengler and Tom Smiley have
done the same with the diagnosis and treatment of hazard trees in
Chapter 17. All told, we have revised or replaced 16 chapters of the
original 26; we've kept 10 chapters as originally written, and
substituted two entirely new chapters, 1 and 14, respectively. With the
emergence of urban and community forestry as the fastest growing part of
our profession in the last several years, the need for a book such as
this inevitably developed. The Society of American Foresters' urban
forestry working group counts over 40 universities now offering courses
in this subject, and the number is growing.
