City Trees is a premier publication focused on urban + community forestry. In each issue, you’ll learn how to best manage the trees in your community and more!
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/36513
Last year, mechanized urban tree harvesting was successfully piloted in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Courtesy of Wisconsin DNR munities, Brown County, and the Oneida Nation signed on. And what a year Green Bay had! When the regular season was over, the Packers had earned 312 trees for the urban forests of the Green Bay region�and they’ve committed to do it again this coming year. Your city’s team doesn’t have to be a world cham- pion to be a partner, however. Major League Baseball’s Milwaukee Brewers has teamed up with the DNR to plant trees along the Hank Aaron State Trail that runs by its Miller Park stadium. And even the Madison Mallards, a summer collegiate Northwoods League baseball team, has joined with local landscaper Barnes Inc. and the Madison Parks Department to plant a tree in a Madison park every time the Mallards break one of their ash bats. This will not only green the community but raise awareness of the threat of EAB. Unconventional Partners In March 2002, leading bird conservation organizations in our state created the Wisconsin Bird Conservation Initiative (WBCI). It has since been endorsed by 167 orga- nizations, from the statewide Audubon Council to local bird clubs and businesses. WBCI’s Urban Committee introduced the concept for Bird City Wisconsin early on, based on the success of the Arbor Day Foundation’s Tree City USA program. They wanted a program that could do for communities and their bird life what Tree City USA has accomplished in the field of urban forestry. WBCI received a grant to create Bird City Wisconsin through the TogetherGreen program, a unique alliance between the National Audubon Society and Toyota. How exactly does this relate to urban forestry? Obviously urban forests create both migration stop-over and nest- ing habitat for birds. WBCI recognized this, so Tree City USA certification is one of the requirements needed to be www.urban-forestry.com designated a Bird City Wisconsin. In 2010, the inaugural year, 15 Wisconsin communities were designated Bird Cities. For more info, visit www.birdcitywisconsin.org. Traditional “saw log” forestry and urban forestry may not seem like conventional partners, either, but the threat of EAB has people thinking outside of the box. In 2010, Wisconsin DNR Forestry partnered with nonprofit agen- cies, businesses, and the City of Oak Creek to study and demonstrate the use of mechanized logging and processing equipment in an urban setting. The hope was that this could reduce tree removal and disposal costs for communities, generate marketable pulpwood, biomass, and saw logs, and provide loggers with a new urban market for their services during downtimes in traditional forest harvesting. In five days, 516 trees were cut, removed, and pro- cessed, with 65 of these being less than 5 inches (12.7 cm) in diameter. The cost of the demonstration was approximately $26,000. Combining the three resulting wood products–saw logs, pulpwood, and biomass–it ended up costing approximately $900 to process and utilize/dispose of 470 trees (46 were utilized for firewood). Overall, this demonstration has proven that using mechanized logging equipment could be economi- cal for urban tree removal. Additional demonstrations are needed utilizing various equipment under different circumstances. For more information on urban wood utilization, visit the USFS Wood Education and Resource Center (www.na.fs.fed.us/werc) and the Ash Utilization Options Project (www.semircd.org/ash). I hope you’ll be sure to come to the SMA Annual Conference in Milwaukee this September. You can visit Miller Park, the Schlitz Audubon Center, or the City of Oak Creek to see some of these partnerships in action– or just get some ideas from your colleagues at the con- ference to inspire your own creative partnerships. 23