Arboricultural codes of ethics lack protection for trees, wildlife, and biodiversity: A review of codes from national and international professional associations
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Conservation and environmental protection are important to many arborists and urban foresters. • Arboricultural professional associations have codes of ethics that regulate professional members. • Environmental themes are underrepresented in existing codes of ethics. • Adherence to laws is addressed generally, rather than adherence to specific environmental laws. • Professional associations may be limited in their ability to respond to unethical actions. Arboriculture practices have the potential to negatively impact the natural environment, including through the pruning or removal of trees with cavities or hollows, the misuse of pesticides, and operations that are injurious to wildlife. Mitigating approaches have been limited by market disincentives, under-enforcement, and voluntary best management practices and standards. For arborists in professional associations, codes of ethics (COEs) may have the potential to improve environmentalism within arboriculture while ensuring public trust in the associations themselves. To determine how environmental protection is discussed in arboricultural COEs, we conducted a review of nine COEs from seven national and international arboricultural professional associations, coding for environmental themes and legal/regulatory requirements. Seven COEs included a total of twelve environmentally related themes, most commonly discussing trees (n=8) and the environment (n=5). Wildlife and urban forest health were not mentioned. No COE referenced environmental laws, although six COEs required adherence with laws generally. The lack of specific prohibitions or mandates on environmentally friendly practices may allow practitioners to take advantage of COE loopholes, which would allow environmentally negative practice that could not be disciplined by an ethics committee unless the code was revised. While an alternative means of environmental governance through COEs might examine whether professional members adhered to local laws and regulations, associations may face difficulties in reviewing and properly applying legislation in disciplining their members, particularly when international associations must review legislation outside of the ethics committee's region(s) of practice. We provide recommendations for improving ethics programs, including five suggested additions for COEs.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it