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: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/677172
www.urban-forestry.com 33 ing to reduced canopy the following year. This in turn further reduces carbohydrate production and storage, which lowers the trees defenses against pests and diseases, and slows healthy new tissue formation. Of course, some species are more drought tolerant than oth- ers, but if severe drought persists, even the tolerant species become stressed, weakened, or die. Severe drought can have long-lasting effects on those trees that survive. As wood tissues dry, they separate, creating internal checks and shanks. These hidden faults become points where limbs break under load bearing stress such as wind, rain, ice, snow, or flush of growth. The Ultimate Priority Fort Worth saw a 13% increase in Priority 1 work orders during the summer of 2011—but this was only a preview of things to come. Priority 1 work orders for our Forestry Section are those with an immediate threat to life or property and include hanging limbs, trees down and blocking the street, or trees on vehicles or buildings. The volume of Priority 1 work orders increased an additional 42% in 2012 and remained that high in 2013. In an average year the Forestry Section contracts the removal of 447 city trees. During the five-year drought, Forestry con - tracted the removal of 6,129 city trees—almost nine times the normal. Early on, we decided to utilize the basic struc- ture we use for emergency response, which is an Emergency Operations Planning "P" developed by the United States Coast Guard. That gave us an invaluable framework for cre- ating an Incident Action Plan (IAP) that focused our efforts. In the summer of 2011, we saw trees suffer from prolonged triple digit temperatures and drought. Forestry staff was in the middle of a street tree inventory when trees started to decline. We honed our data collection to focus on dead, dying, and severely stressed trees. We predicted that 66,000 City trees would require pruning or removal within the subse - quent three years. Before the drought, the Fort Worth Forestry Section had established guidelines for storm response and priority rank- ing; we utilized the same ranking for removing the volume of trees killed by drought. As is standard operating procedure for storm response, streets had priority over parks and arterials had priority over residential areas in order to keep streets free A Fort Worth Citizen Forester helps with tree assessments in a drought-impact park. Courtesy Fort Worth Forestry Section