The Urban Tree Canopy Mapper is a project that
maximized partnerships among the Chesapeake Bay
Program, the Virginia Department of Forestry, the
Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation,
USDA Forest Service, the Virginia Geospatial Extension
Program at Virginia Tech, and localities across the
state. Wiseman and Day say that Barbara White, their
state urban forestry coordinator, really got the wheels
in motion for the project. Here is a link to an article
in Virginia Forests about the genesis of the project:
h t t p : / / u r b a n f o r e s t r y. f r e c . v t . e d u / d o c u m e n t s /
WisemanMcGee-2010-VFA.pdf
UTC Assessments and the Chesapeake Bay
Watershed
Wiseman is enthused about the work of his graduate
student, Lele Kimball, as she studies the obstacles
and opportunities faced by municipal decision makers
in utilizing UTC assessments for urban forest policy
and planning. Again, the 27 localities in the state are
the initial subjects of the study, though she intends to
expand to the entire Chesapeake Bay Watershed. How
are UTC assessments provided by Virginia Tech being
used throughout the Watershed to meet BMPs for Bay
water quality protection?
Improving Sampling Procedures for i-Tree
Protocols
Wiseman and former graduate student Mason
Patterson worked with i-Tree STREETS for two years
and found there were some potential opportunities
to improve the inventory sampling protocol. Wiseman
says, "In i-Tree there's an implicit sampling assumption that city streets are laid out in conventional grids
with more or less uniform lengths. This works well for
cities like Chicago, but for modern suburban cities, the
streetscape rarely follows this convention. As a result,
there's a lot of sampling error that gets introduced
into the estimates of the street tree population when
following the basic STREETS protocol. Mason has
come up with a GIS procedure to standardize a city's
network of streets so as to have uniform sampling
In spring 2011, volunteer arborists from the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the International Society of Arboriculture donated tree care services
for preservation of the Alwood bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) on the Virginia Tech campus. Photo by Eric Wiseman
www.urban-forestry.com
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