The Resilient Canopy
Brett O'Brien on trees and climate in the American Midwest,
observations from decades with the City of Columbia, Missouri,
and the community forestry resiliency movement he's
particularly enthused about.
By Michelle Sutton, Editor, City Trees
Longtime UCFS Member Brett O'Brien worked for the City of Columbia, Missouri for
34.5 years before retiring four years ago; his last and longest position was as Natural
Resources Supervisor, which included oversight of the urban forest. O'Brien served as
City Trees Editorial Review Committee (ERC) Chair for five years and remains an active
member. He has been active with the Missouri Community Forestry Council (MCFC) in
various capacities including as treasurer and as editor of its newsletter, Cityscape.
Because of that and his involvement with MCFC and with the Midwestern Chapter
– International Society of Arboriculture—including serving as the latter's president
in 2019-2020, O'Brien is exceptionally well positioned to speak on matters of urban
forest resilience for his region. He's also an MFI grad, and he is one of the kindest
people you'll ever meet.
It was late in the summer of 1985 when
O'Brien started working for the City of Columbia
Parks and Recreation Department; the landscape
crew worked out of hangars from a former munic-
ipal airport. The budget back then was quite
small, so the crew had to be resourceful. "In the
early days, we did a fair amount of transplanting
of readily available wild saplings of things like red
cedar (Juniperus virginiana) for screening and black
locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) for parks and natural
areas," O'Brien says. Though brittle, black locust
stood up to Mid-Missouri's heat, humidity, and peri-
odic drought. Tolerant of poor soils, it was used for
erosion control and land reclamation; it performed
its early successional function—in a nascent urban
forest landscape. It also foiled downtown bar patrons.
"The thorns on the black locusts kept drunk people
from trying to snap young trees," O'Brien says.
A few years before O'Brien started with the City, a
Christmas tree farm was being sold off to make way
for neighborhoods, and the farm donated a ton of
Scotch pines (Pinus sylvestris) to the City, which it
planted with abandon. "The pines made for great
screening, but by the time I started my job, pine
wilt nematode (Bursaphelenchus xylophilus) really
burst onto the scene," O'Brien says. "I spent a lot of
time removing Scotch pines, which was a good early
lesson for me about the need for tree diversity." >>
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