I have joined the Board of Trustees for TreeLink, a national urban forestry organization. When my business partner and I started Gray Hill Solutions, one of the first things we sold was a product for Urban Foresters called TreePro. It was, as you might expect, a GIS-based asset management program.
Over the years, it became clear that Urban Forestry as a practice was highly necessary, yet chronically underfunded. When Kevin Jahne did a market analysis for it, he announced we'd have to sell eight copies a month to make it worth doing. As it was, we ended up selling about eight licenses total.
Around the time we were really rolling, we sold about 10 copies in two months - only to have all of the sales be stopped in their tracks. The dot com collapse suddenly meant cities were a lot poorer. They couldn't afford to track their leafies.
The problem is, while most people think of trees as things that never do anything but be green, trees actually remove pollution, cool the streetscape, cool your houses, save energy, stabilize slopes and raise property values. When they are misbehaving, trees fall on houses, harbor pests, drop limbs on children and catch on fire. Some trees are the focal point of view corridors. Some trees block view corridors.
Even this short list belies the complexity of urban trees. Some urban trees are city responsibility. Some are not. In the City of Seattle some trees belong to the parks department, some to the transportation department, some to schools, etc.
There are many tales of citizens, angry with their City for stopping them from having a tree cut down because it blocks their view, will hire someone to kill the tree or remove it secretively. Then the slope it was on collapses. Or the invasive ivy which loves direct sunlight goes berzerk.
Trees are also sorta fickle. They grow really well in some areas, not so well in others, and not at all in still others. Some trees love to be pruned. Others do not.
Urban Foresters plant, maintain, and remove the trees of a city. They plan where they should go. They understand the soils, slope stability, invasive plants, and aesthetics of a city.
Urban Foresters need to know the location of the trees and the histories of the trees and locations of trees. But, since they're so underfunded, one of my first goals with TreeLink is to figure out how to create an open source version of TreePro out there for the community to just download. My second goal is to help TreeLink build an on-line community for Urban Foresters to share resources and communicate.
So click on the link above and see the picture my wife likes. You wouldn't believe how long it took to find one she found acceptable.
Comments