Despite what numerous studies on the perceived importance and value of urban trees may suggest, urban trees are subject to endless debates and controversies. The problems span individuals’ reluctance to clean up leaves to broader discussions on what a ‘modern city’ should look like. To study these issues, we benefitted from a national-scale policy liberalization that involved a drastic change in regulations regarding the tree management in Poland. Between January and June 2017, private property owners were allowed to freely remove trees on their property (with few exceptions, e.g. nature monuments). This involved repealing the previous obligations to obtain permission to remove trees, any charges and fines that previously applied for removing trees, and the obligation to report removed trees. The change was introduced by a populist government and resulted in both the massive removal of trees but also broad public debate. Eventually, the previous obligations and system of charges were reintroduced, although the new charges were lower. To study the canopy cover loss resulting from this liberalization in the context of longer-time change, using satellite images from Google Earth, we manually mapped removed trees in selected urban quarters representing different types of urban structure in our case study city over a decade 2010–2019. The results show that the tree loss during the liberalization far exceeded the tree loss over all the other years during the decade, and that 80% of this loss occurred on private land. They also show that the level of tree removal returned to normal when the regulations were restored. We discuss these issues in the context of the broader debate on the value of trees and the related policy liberalization, and explore the potential reasons why landowners so enthusiastically seized the opportunity to remove trees. Finally, we suggest how to better protect urban trees.

尽管关于城市树木的重要性和价值的大量研究表明，城市树木受到无休止的辩论和争议。问题涉及个人不愿清理的话题，导致人们对“现代城市”的面貌进行更广泛的讨论。为了研究这些问题，我们受益于全国范围的政策自由化，该政策涉及波兰树木管理法规的急剧变化。在2017年1月至2017年6月期间，允许私有财产所有人自由清除其树木上的树木（除少数例外，例如自然遗迹）。这涉及废除先前获得砍伐树木的义务，先前申请砍伐树木的任何收费和罚款以及报告砍伐树木的义务。这项改变是由民粹主义政府提出的，不仅导致了树木的大量砍伐，而且引起了广泛的公众辩论。最终，尽管新的收费较低，但以前的义务和收费制度又重新引入。为了研究在长时间变化的情况下这种自由化导致的树冠覆盖损失，我们使用Google Earth的卫星图像，手动绘制了案例研究城市中代表特定城市结构的选定城市区域中被切除的树木，这些树木在2010年的十年中–2019年。结果表明，自由化期间的树木损失远远超过十年中所有其他年份的树木损失，其中80％的损失发生在私人土地上。他们还表明，恢复法规后，树木采伐水平恢复了正常。我们将在关于树木价值和相关政策自由化的更广泛辩论的背景下讨论这些问题，并探讨土地所有者如此热情地抓住机会清除树木的潜在原因。最后，我们建议如何更好地保护城市树木。