Street Tree Inventories and Young Tree Monitoring
TreePennsylvania in collaboration with PA DCNR Bureau of Forestry staff and other TreeVitalize partners offers technical assistance to communities interested in conducting street tree inventories, young tree monitoring and general urban forest management activities. The two tools that are detailed below: Pennsylvania Community Tree Map and Citizen Tree Monitoring Training Toolkit were developed by TreePennsylvania and DCNR Bureau of Forestry as tools to assist communities with urban forest planning. These resources are free and are available to every community in Pennsylvania.
TreeVitalize works with local municipalities throughout Pennsylvania to research, develop, and assess urban tree canopy findings. This data can inform the urban tree management plans of municipalities and highlight areas of success and need. Please contact Mark Hockley (c-mhockley@pa.gov), Tree Canopy Coordinator with any questions.
Pennsylvania Community Tree Map
The PA DCNR Bureau of Forestry received a U.S. Forest Service grant to provide communities statewide with a free open-sourced, interactive cloud-based community tree mapping tool to help them better manage and grow their forests. This tool helps communities educate citizens on trees’ ecosystem benefits, increase awareness of canopy coverage and make more informed land planning decisions. The tool gives communities’, volunteers and urban tree managers the ability to conduct tree inventories, monitoring activities, urban tree canopy analysis and track tree maintenance and stewardship activities. To subscribe to the map and create an account, please visit the OpenTreeMap website, found here.
Young Urban Tree Monitoring
Monitoring the health and survival of newly planted trees informs communities of trees mortality rates. As U.S. Forest Service Researcher, Lara Roman stated “Understanding the urban tree mortality process is critical to planning for cycles of tree removal and replacement, modeling tree population changes over time, and accurately predicting ecosystem services provided by urban forests.” (reference)
TreePennsylvania in conjunction with the Bureau of Forestry, Penn State Extension, and U.S. Forest Service, developed a training toolkit to enable volunteers/citizen scientists to monitor newly planted trees across the state. Throughout the monitoring process, PA Community Tree Map is utilized to GEOlocate and monitor trees. The training toolkit is adaptable to suit a wide-range of tree monitoring needs and/or activities. The toolkit includes citizen-oriented training guide and supporting materials (curriculum, presentation slides, tree ID guide). The target audience for these training materials is local governments, nonprofits, and volunteers. These ready-to-use training materials are an essential component to sustainable urban forestry programs.
treepennsylvania.org 