Lecture: Dr. Geoffrey Donovan on the Surprising Links Between Trees and Human Health
Urban Forest Initiative, along with the Department of Economics in the Gatton College of Business and Economics, presents a lecture by Dr. Geoffrey Donovan (U.S. Forest Service, ret.) on the surprising health benefits of trees.
Dr. Donovan's talk is titled "Using Natural Experiments to Investigate the Relationship Between Urban Trees and Health."
Reception: 2:30 p.m., 1st Floor Atrium (please RSVP by Friday, April 17)
About Dr. Donovan
Dr. Donovan received his PhD is forest economics from Colorado State University in 2001. He then worked for 23 years as an economist for the USDA Forest Service in Alaska and Oregon. Currently he’s the owner of Ash and Elm Consulting, which is focused on making the business case for urban trees.
His primary research focus has been quantifying the benefits of urban trees. These have ranged from intuitive benefits—reduced summertime cooling costs and increased home values, for example—to less intuitive benefits such as crime reduction. He has worked extensively on the relationship between trees and public health finding that mothers with trees around their homes are less likely to have underweight babies, and when trees are killed by an invasive pest, more people die from cardiovascular and lower-respiratory diseases. Currently, he is focusing on how exposure to plant diversity may protect against a range of immune diseases.
