Urban Trees and Ecosystem Disservices: a Pilot Study Using Complaints Records from Three Swedish Cities

Past research on urban ecosystem performance has focused mainly on ecosystem services, rather than disservices. However, to justify and fully utilize urban ecosystems, it is important also to assess and minimize the disservices they provide. The aim of this pilot study in Sweden was to contribute to the emerging understanding of urban ecosystem disservices. The central research question focused on how complaint/comment recordings at municipal park departments could be used as a source of knowledge on urban tree disservices. Records obtained from the municipal park departments in the three largest cities in Sweden provided evidence of several types of disservices. However, they also had obvious shortcomings that would need to be resolved before they could be used more widely as a source of information on ecosystem disservices. Suggestions for improving the data are provided.