Community Forestry Program Work Team, Cornell Univ. Community Forestry Home Page Community Forestry Planning Developing a Master Plan Acknowledgments (work team members) Conducting a Street Tree Inventory Street Tree Project History Hiring the SWAT Team Using Local Volunteers Using Municipal Staff Training Procedure Utilizing the street tree inventory PR Documents and Training Downloads Tree Inventory Template Download Resources Site contact: Dr. Nina L. Bassuk Dept. of Horticulture Room 20 Plant Science Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Phone: (607) 255-4586 Fax:(607) 255-9998 Email: nlb2@cornell.edu Community Forestry Conducting a Street Tree Inventory Street Tree Project History Most of the urban forests in New York State occur in small communities that often can not budget for the services of a dedicated city forester. Typically, a member of the Department of Public Works takes on the care of the trees along with all other civic infrastructure responsibilities. However, if these small communities are seen as a group, they make up the largest portion of NY's urban forest-greater than all the large cities combined. The Cornell Cooperative Extension Program Work Team on Community Forestry felt that these communities were being underserved by arboriculture and urban forestry professionals and extension mostly because there is no mechanism to engage them in a proactive urban forestry management process. To address this problem, we felt we could develop a master planning process that would work well for communities who did not have a dedicated urban forester. The elements of our master plan process are: Identify village communities interested in working with us. Utilize USDA Forest Service software to create a multi-user Palm Pilot tree-inventorying program that would output to a simple spreadsheet such as Excel or Access. In addition to typical tree management data, include the USDA Forest Service's UFORE program, which quantifies economic benefits of the urban forest to the community. Train students or volunteers to take the inventory data using Personal Digital Assistant's (PDA's). The project was piloted in 2002 with 13 students being trained in early September by Nina Bassuk and Paul O'Connor at Cornell. The Village of Liverpool was inventoried during September 14 and 15, 2002, and Cobleskill was inventoried on September 21, 2002. Every street tree and potential planting space was counted in each village. Data was analyzed and a workshop held on December 4th for officials in both pilot villages as well as other communities who may be interested in the process for their own community. Communities learned about their urban forest resources and how to make decisions about community forestry goals and implementation strategies. This approach to urban forestry management is unique in being able to incorporate multi-user PDA's and Forest Service models for determining economic benefits of street trees in addition to more traditional inventory data. The support to carry out these pilot projects came primarily from the communities themselves. Back to Conducting a street tree inventory © Copyright, Department of Horticulture, Cornell University.