The structural and functional attributes of urban and peri-urban forests are the basis for the provision of a suite of ecosystem services that directly and indirectly benefit residents across scales, tenures and land uses. As such, many local governments promote municipal urban forest initiatives such as maintenance and management plans, ordinances, and tree-giveaway programs (e.g. Orlando, USA and Sydney, Australia). However, the effectiveness and distributional fairness of these activities often overlooks residents’ values and preferences for certain tree functional traits, sizes, densities and associated costs. This study implements an online survey of 724 Florida, USA residents, to: 1) examine preferences/tradeoffs for multiple urban forest structure-function attributes; 2) quantify and assess the differences in willingness-to-pay (WTP) for these forest structure attributes in public areas; and 3) examine the implications of value heterogeneity for tree function-structure attributes for purposes of crafting policies or designing public programs dealing with urban forests. Only 19% of respondents indicated a serious concern about living close to trees and flowering plants that produce pollen that can result in allergies. Similarly, only 12% were concerned about hurricane wind impacts to and from their treescapes. Using latent class modeling and a stated preferences panel data, our results reveal important differences in WTP along multiple value groups, each with different WTP values for: tree nativity (native vs. exotic); number of species (many vs. few) and size of trees (fully grown vs. mix of ages); as well as maintenance costs. The novel approach of this study indicates the importance of using tree functional traits versus species taxa and accounting for diverse values among the public for more effective decisions. Findings can be used to inform timely policy initiatives, while providing additional evidence of the ubiquity of the public’s heterogeneous values and providing guidance to avoid potentially misleading policy interpretations.

城市和城郊森林的结构和功能属性是提供一系列生态系统服务的基础，这些服务可以直接和间接地使不同规模、权属和土地用途的居民受益。因此，许多地方政府促进市政城市森林倡议，例如维护和管理计划、条例和树木赠品计划（例如，美国奥兰多和澳大利亚悉尼）。然而，这些活动的有效性和分配公平性往往忽视了居民对某些树木功能特性、大小、密度和相关成本的价值观和偏好。本研究对 724 名美国佛罗里达州居民进行了在线调查，以：1) 检查多个城市森林结构-功能属性的偏好/权衡；2) 量化和评估这些公共区域森林结构属性的支付意愿（WTP）差异；3）为了制定政策或设计处理城市森林的公共项目，检查价值异质性对树木功能-结构属性的影响。只有 19% 的受访者表示严重担心生活在树木和开花植物附近，这些树木和开花植物会产生可能导致过敏的花粉。同样，只有 12% 的人担心飓风会影响他们的树木景观。使用潜在类别建模和陈述的偏好面板数据，我们的结果揭示了多个价值组的 WTP 的重要差异，每个组具有不同的 WTP 值：物种数量（多与少）和树木大小（完全成长与年龄混合）；以及维护成本。本研究的新方法表明使用树木功能特征与物种分类群的重要性，并考虑公众的不同价值观以做出更有效的决策。调查结果可用于为及时的政策举措提供信息，同时提供额外的证据证明公众的异质价值观无处不在，并提供指导以避免潜在的误导性政策解释。