26 City Trees 26 City Trees
City of Aspen, Colorado
Ben Carlsen (City Forester, Aspen, Colorado)
The City of Aspen's Forestry Program developed in
the late 1990s out of a need to more actively manage an
over-mature canopy of cottonwood trees that were beginning
to fail (cottonwood trees are native to Aspen and are the
primary source of canopy cover here). In 2006, the Colorado
State Forest Service performed a complete inventory of over
7,000 street and park trees in Aspen using GPS units. Since
then, the data has been managed in Esri ArcMap GIS soft-
ware. This allowed staff to have a better understanding of
what made up the community forest and to be more active
managers of the resource.
However, the process to update and make changes to the
inventory was tedious and time-consuming. Paper maps were
printed and the forestry crew or contractors would make notes
nicate work assignments to employees in several
different locations. The platform allows us to add
or remove features; we were able to set up the Zoo
and County Parks as separate entities and to dis-
play park and priority work area boundaries in the
online map. One item of future consideration is
integrating the enterprise tree inventory software
Milwaukee County Parks and Zoo are set up as separate organizations; users click to "load" trees or zoom the map, and reports for the
Parks or Zoo summarize only their data.
with the County's ArcGIS and CityWorks servers.
Within just a few months, the Zoo and County
Parks have inventoried over 21,000 individu-
al trees. Watch the data collection grow and
explore our reporting stats at
https://pg-cloud.
com/Milwaukee.
