My name is Joanne
and I am the technical assistance coordinator,
which means I do a lot of the,
keeps on the ground stuff
with communities for the state's urban
and community forestry program.
So the tool that I'm talking
to you about today is not super
complicated and it really is
as reflecting on what folks were talking
about in the panel this morning,
just that other side of the coin
of what's the
high tech modeling and then what's
the thing that people can
use on the ground and what challenges
does that have when you migrate
from even just pen and paper to a digital platform.
So just a little bit of background
for folks who are like,
I'm in a forestry conference,
what is this urban forestry thing?
So trees in urban areas are still
all part of the same forest.
And what is urban?
That can be a scary word for some of our mantras,
but I know many of you live
in Arlington or urban areas
and 3% of all US land area
is considered urban by some definitions,
but 80% and growing
of the population lives in urban areas.
So if we're talking about the trees
that people actually see from day to day,
it's likely outside their window
or along their street or maybe
on their drive or bus ride.
Vermont's urban forest, we think over 243,000 people.
So just under half of Vermonter's live within an area
described as urban.
So high population density,
high impervious surface,
low-ish tree canopy cover compared
to the green mountains.
And this number of course is growing as well.
Particularly if you look
at 2020 census data up to what,
where we know people live today,
only two or three years later,
more and more folks are coming
to urban areas or at least
suburban areas in Vermont.
So we think there's approximately
12 million give or take a
million trees in Vermont urban areas.
So what does urban forestry look like?
This is our sort,
I mean my spray (indistinct) photo of urban forestry
and like forest are part of our lived areas.
And certainly when you think about how trees grow,
how they stay healthy, it's all the same for us.
They all need the same things.
But who does urban
and community forestry work?
Sometimes it's folks like me,
I've stayed in Vermont
or in all of our other state programs.
But often it's just
a group of people who decide
to go out one day
and do some good work on the ground.
So it's really an interesting
time right now as we look at
money coming into urban forestry
and all the different
models or infrastructure
that might support and the
bottom up approach
that urban forestry takes, which is,
volunteers, students.
I mean I've taken out middle schoolers
to do urban tree inventory.
So in Vermont we have only four cities
with professional arbor on staff,
meaning the city that it's paying
a person to care for trees.
And those are Montpelier's, Burlington,
south Burlington and Rutland.
We have nine tree cities
which means that they've hit some
kind of benchmark that makes
them a little more invested
in urban forestry in their state.
But again municipal the help is homegrown.
This is an awesome group from I think Corrin.
They went out on some march weekends
and inventoried all the ash trees
in the right of way along their rural roads.
Our program estimates
this year we've had over 10,000 hours
of volunteer labor, over
a hundred communities are developing
or managing an urban
and community forestry management plans
with some kind of upper level approach.
Keep in mind only four of
those are actually paid staff
and over 129 communities this year
have received help either
technical, financial,
educational from our program.
So it's happening.
And what do you do to provide
people with a tool to help
them count, monitor their trees?
There's a lot of high level maps
that we can use and we do
use at a state level.
This is a tree equity score map,
zoomed in on the Burlington area
one 'cause that's where we are.
And two, because that's the only one
in Vermont that's been matched.
Looking at, all the variety of factors
that influence where
and how trees are planted
and where they can thrive.
This is from American Forest
across Vermont's Department
of health goes to the town level.
They're thinking about trees
a lot particularly with regard
to climate change and heat related illness.
So this gets at a town by town level
of where do you expect
to find people with greater risk
of heat related illness.
We use this data to figure out
where to implement some of
our community canopy programs,
which are tree giveaways
to private homeowners and landowners.
We are messing around with some of our own maps.
This is a map we're working
on this month with our ANR-GIS team
about impervious land cover
and tree canopy and sort of which
is which and where should we go with technical help.
But even this, you're not looking
at that exact well on the ground where
the tree may or may not go.
So ultimately as they're saying this morning,
there's nothing better
than getting out in the woods,
whether it's your urban or suburban
or exurban or whatever
forest and to go out with people
who are interested to touch some trees.
So we built a tool,
our program built a tool back
in 2013 as part of a caring
for the urban forest grant
that we received from the US Forest Service.
And I put all the text here
in case the slide goes out
further and you want the history.
But back then we teamed
with our amazing GIS staff at agency
Natural Resources who are pulled
in a million directions.
But we pulled them to us as
often as we can to build on the
ground digital urban tree inventory tool.
And really urban could be a sidewalk
and a green strip like this,
it could be something like a municipal park,
any kind of wooded area.
You don't have to see a car
to be looking at an urban tree.
We've 20 municipalities initially
completed some kind of inventory
and when the technology became available
in 2017, nine of these towns elected
to have a web map viewer,
which means they could actually
go from like a snapshot printable PDF
report to something that was interactive
and they could update on the web.
So in 2022 this we realized
the software was different,
the technology was different,
we were a little out of date
on what folks wanted in their
urban tree inventory tool.
And myself and Eric Enstro again
from agency Natural Resources,
GIS built a new tool and
it's a little hard because there
were a lot of things that were
new technology even though
the data we were collecting
was really fairly straightforward.
So I'm gonna walk you through a few of
what that looks like so that you
or people you know in your community
can call me and we can go out
and look at trees together using this tool.
This is the end result of a web map.
You were with a bunch of filters
on one side and actual just dots
on the ground showing where trees are,
here they're displayed by conditions.
So green is a good conditioning tree
red all the way down to tech core or even dead.
And we've even got a lot
of these gray which is where there
isn't a tree but there either
used to be or could be.
And so I like to show folks,
how this works.
You can start to filter by condition, by species,
by when it was planted
so you know when to go water it,
all kinds of things that are
low hanging fruit filters.
Each little tree has a dashboard
which we are super proud of 'cause
that was a new thing
to be able to show volunteers.
This is a, little leaf linden,
it's in good condition,
it's between 12 and 18 inches diameter.
Here's a picture and we can keep
like a breadcrumb of all
those trail of all those pictures.
The information is first collected in field maps.
We know we built it in collector first
and honestly when you're working
with hundreds of volunteers,
just getting them to open field maps
instead of collector is a really big deal.
And so trying to keep all these changes really manageable
and explainable to folks.
We enter out location data and photos
and field mask and again,
it's really neat when you're dealing
with urban trees to be able to keep,
photos through the years of how
that tree has grown or disappeared.
That sometimes is the case.
From the boat you'll see here
there's some links where it says
submit tree health survey,
submit tree maintenance survey.
So this is where using survey 123
we link folks to the essentials,
what species is it and that lets
you enter the common name.
So here's sugar maple.
Keep in mind some people are like, it's a maple,
that's all I can tell you.
So you're able to enter maple
and the Acer genus pops up
and it's left this blank at that that.
So really trying to again meet people
where they're in the field.
A required field is diameter class,
which is just a really basic proxy for size.
And I was looking at some of those,
models popping up today of the whole tree in 3D
and I wish we could do that easily,
but ours is just a diameter tape
and the bigger the diameter,
the bigger the tree and maybe the older the tree.
And that's like as fancy as a guest
in terms of determining age or size.
It would be great to measure height
and canopy spread,
but that's pretty time consuming for the volunteers.
It's conditioned, good, fair, poor, dead.
We have a couple little pictures
to go along with that.
It has been removed,
which is a big deal if you're dealing
with inventory over time.
Just to scoot through some
of the screens as they look,
you can answer a couple questions
about the tree management
type 'cause how you take care
of the tree is hugely influenced
by who's going to do it.
Is it a private landowner?
Is it the town?
Is it a utility right of way?
Is this tree a memorial to someone
and you should be contacting that person.
And then lastly,
some really basic information
about the health of the tree.
Keeping in mind that many folks
are just people who like
trees and they like working outside
and they're going to see is they're deadwood,
is there something we should talk about?
And then really importantly at the bottom,
being able to enter the planting gate.
Trees need water,
news to a lot of people, but they do need water
and you do need to send folks out
certainly for the first two years,
watering these trees
on a more regular basis.
So being able to filter trees
just by the date they're
planted has been a real boom
to volunteers who are like, okay,
high school student x walk
to these docks and water them and it works.
So at this point, this little picture break you,
your inventory could be done.
This is our program manager
at least happy out on a field day.
And that can be the minimum of what volunteers do.
The data syncs in the background
and they see it on the web viewer.
You can export a spreadsheet.
People find those useful.
They can tally,
they can say how many,
green ash do we have?
You also have the option
to go a little further
and do a maintenance survey essentially
if you're saying this tree
looks pretty good, but yes I think we should monitor it,
you can be done, but you can say, hey,
I think we should do something.
I don't know how much it costs
or who's gonna do it,
but I'm gonna write it down.
And if you open up maintenance,
yes it's still,
gets to these super simple survey questions.
Should we prune it?
Is there too much mulch?
Is it infested with something?
And arbor should come look even
at the bottom there.
Chemical treatment now
that we're treating some green ash
to protect against Emerald dashboard,
that opens up what's the chemical,
who did it, what date?
So it's really like basic management objectives
that then you can also,
as for anyone who's used, survey 123,
keep a survey for each data point.
I'm out there in 2015,
I enter a survey, I'm out again in 2018,
I enter another one
and they all stay in the loop.
So as your volunteers change
and your coordinator changes,
at least you have some record hopefully
of what's going on.
And so again,
now you could be complete
with another piece of inventory,
just a picture break.
Looks like he's hugging the tree
but he's measuring it.
Thanks.
So who's using this tool?
I mentioned it can be a lot of volunteers,
usually municipalities that have
a more professional program,
have a professional software.
Right now we have over 24,000 data
points entered by 34
municipalities and two nonprofits.
It's a lot of data points
but there's way more out there.
34 out of, 250 towns.
The data can be entered
by foresters but lots of times it's
volunteers, interns, students, university students.
We had on the right there
is one of our summer interns, Julia,
who then went on to work with the
UBM environmental problem solving class,
had their class out in Colchester,
Virgins and Rochester
using the tool that inventory green
ash specifically and present
the town's with an inventory
and a cost plan to deal
with ash removal and treatment.
But I think the biggest
thing about inventory tools is that
it just gets people spending
time with their trees and by
virtue with the people around, for sure,
for me that's the biggest boom
of doing inventory is being like,
I remember that tree, I remember that guy I remember.
And it makes it so much more real
when you're able to have
folks on the ground pay attention
to trees and spend some time outside.
They might spend 30 minutes,
they might spend days.
So that is really,
in a less quantitative way,
a huge benefit of having these easy
to use inventory tools.
I throw this up here to say
that these are the communities
that currently have data
in our digital system.
(audience applauding)
If you see your town up there,
maybe you wanna do something since 2014
and if you don't see
your town up there, then maybe
it's a great time to start.
I have just a couple more minutes.
There are many professional softwares
I just showcase two.
This is one's
tree keeper and tree plotter.
These are professional level tools
that Arbor will use.
City of Burlington uses one of them.
They have over 14,000 urban
and community trees to care for.
They're essentially way better
at spitting out work orders
and management tools.
Even get here to like ecological
benefits and greenhouse
gas benefits and things that are tool,
which by the way is free and doesn't offer.
We do have to be careful
that we don't compete with
professional products but honestly
it's not the same game
when you have a whole team
of folks doing this work,
you do need to pay for the software
and often a yearly maintenance fee.
And for many, many,
many communities that
isn't financially viable.
The Montpelier city arborist
who I spent a bunch of time
with, I asked him, wait,
how do he keep track of this stuff?
And I went in his truck
and there's a whole bunch of post-it
notes and his produced report
until you lose one I guess.
And lastly, just to show
what we do with the data,
here's just a few snapshots from Newport City.
This was a 2014 inventory.
There's a bunch of trees downtown,
it looks good when you zoom
in you start to see what the
health and quality of these trees are.
For example, even row of dead trees.
Just to reiterate that even
though there are trees,
not everyone's experience
with them is a good experience.
They could be dangerous,
they could be expensive.
So you're really getting down
at like a granular level of
okay, there's stops on the map
but what do they say
and what can we do differently?
St Alban City lots and lots of locations,
but when you zoom in you literally
see the story of these
are railroad tracks going through,
one side of the tracks
and the other, one side has lots of trees.
The other side has vacant locations,
which incidentally is our most popular
tree species in our inventory.
Vacant, second most popular.
Any these guesses?
It's not scientific, it's truly done by,
it's not like statistically validated
'cause it's just done by
people out as they are out.
But sugar maple,
if you're gonna,
which is really interesting as an urban tree,
it's very intolerant of salt.
And I think those trees will be--
[Attendee 1] Norway maple.
Norway Maple isn't one of the most common ones,
but it's on there for sure, yeah, yep.
And town of Windsor, we're doing a lot of work there.
Now again, like looking at
that yellow is high impervious layer.
The darker green is actually
mix of impervious
and canopy and that simple map of just,
and then the light green
is actually primarily canopy
looking at this totally matches
with our urban tree boots on the ground survey.
This is our highly impervious area,
which also correlates very precisely
with low income neighborhood.
The middle there is the downtown
where there's a lot of trees
that folks that have been taken down
and then the outer are more leafier
neighborhoods around outskirts.
So that's an example.
We're able to, validate the boots
on the ground
with some of the modeling
and doing a similar project in Linden.
Those are Linden Institute high schoolers
who did a bunch of inventory
and we've put trees in the ground
in identified places
in our inventory just this fall.
So there's a lot of technical information about planting
trees in urban spaces.
It's hard like to be a tree in a sidewalk.
Well there's a lot of newer
methods going on about engineered
soils, structure cells.
Happy to talk about any of those,
but it's really an exciting time
to be in urban community
forestry, there's a lot of money coming
into the work right now.
And now we're going from here's
all the data and the money
and the modeling tools to here
are the people and trying to
get trees in the ground
and trying to make that as
straightforward and logical
and also hopefully fun
for people of all ages in these communities.
(audience applauding)
[Presenter] We have a couple of minutes for questions.
[Attendee 2] I was wondering about
your comment that
you have to be careful not
to compete with the private sector.
Is that any direction?
Because it's really interesting
about these subscription services.
You've got fairly small size
companies like Planet Geo
and some of the larger ones
and you are locked in and I do hear
from people in communities like, oh,
we don't have control over our data,
we wanna migrate systems or
we don't have the budget anymore.
And I just love your thoughts on,
I think what's great about this is
that you folks control the data.
It's easy to use.
It's free and I think
that's a huge benefit
and I yet to see anyone make
any important decision on street
tree planting based on whether
they're open forest is worth
$1 million or $29 million,
like what's your different decision?
You're gonna not plant trees
-because you think it's less. -Yes.
[Attendee 2] So I think what you folks
have done is like just simple,
straightforward and very effective.
Yeah, thanks.
It feels effective.
Also, I was at the New England ISA
that our conference for arborists
just a couple weeks ago
and they were talking
in other states how Davey Trees comes
in and does a urban tree inventory
and the town pays them.
I'm like, the town pays them,
I just like rustle off the
middle schoolers and we go out and that,
you can just see
that high level expertise having
a benefit that rolls out
in a way that volunteers are vested.
But then the middle schoolers
go to high school and then go
to college and you have to start over.
(audience applauding)
The professional schools are pretty (indistinct)
and some states do
use their money to like grant
that subscription software to municipality.
But yeah, all this data
is held at state of Vermont.
People ask me what does the state do with it?
And frankly nothing
it's for the town and we can do things with it.
We do like for our own planning purposes,
but the intent is not like,
tell us your information and we'll keep it.
It's really for them.
I know I'm standing between you
and lunch end of the question.
[Attendee 3] Yes (indistinct).
I'm curious about the interaction
with utilities in (indistinct),
is that something,
I mean I assume you run into that a lot.
[Joanne] Yeah.
[Attendee 3] And yeah anyway,
how do you deal with that?
[Joanne] Yeah, so we have in all of our inventory tools,
we also have a rapid roadside
ash inventory tool,
which is this narrowed down.
It just ash trees gets
into the tree management type.
Is there a utility line there or not?
The utilities are pretty self-sufficient.
They have some neat software
that goes well beyond ours
in terms of managing trees.
Generally if a utility line is there,
the town does not deal with it
until it falls on the ground,
the two in the morning and then
the time will go and deal with it.
So it gets into that management type.
We've asked utilities, do you want our data?
Like that's useful
and particularly regarding ASH
and generally the answer is no.
I think they're just overwhelmed.
They don't have (indistinct).
[Attendee 3] Slowly getting better at it.
So you're planting in utility, right?
Is that something?
[Joanne] No, not usually.
I mean it's hard because you need
something small and there
are small trees but it's still a tree,
it's still big and so yeah,
generally when I'm identifying places
in communities to plant,
it's honestly no utilities can be
but if they don't have trees in other places,
let's go to the other places first
and then underground utilities as well.
Like dig safe is in my speed that now.
Yeah,
it's tricky and you see those
trees that get planted,
they're just on my street,
someone's planted at on a northern red Oak under utility
right under and you can see it's future.
It's gonna be a leaner, yeah.
One question.
Yep.
[Attendee 4] You mentioned, so like groups,
even getting groups that are used
to doing like paper forms
and stuff onto even a simple
centralized database can be challenging.
So I was wondering if you had
any success stories or advice
from groups that like went
from sticky notes to centralized what database.
[Joanne] I have a couple of stories
where it didn't work.
Like towns tried to do it and they were,
it was too hard or they tried
to pay subscription
and couldn't keep up the payment.
Yes, one way we do that is that both field maps
and survey 123 are free.
They can be downloaded onto your smartphone.
We also have about a dozen cell
enabled iPads that along our
program and we bring them to the community,
we help people use them and some people
are like great click, click, click and they're done.
Others they don't know how to turn it on.
We're starting at the beginning.
So having that equipment and the iPads
are great 'cause they're there
and they're just easier to see.
So yeah, I would say that
there's most of those towns that are in there,
well not most, maybe a quarter
had some kind of inventory to start
and the rest were just like
what's inventory where, which we do.
So there are still a lot of towns
that use pen and paper,
particularly the small village towns.
They've got
20 trees on their urban green
and those are the only
municipal trees in town.
And really for them
we always have like a tier one option,
which was pet pen paper
and people you know doing a tally
and that can work just as well.
[Attendee 4] Does showing like the web interface,
does that make people like,
Ooh I want that or does
that scare people even more sometimes?
[Joanne] Both.
I think folks now even compared to five years ago,
are more willing to have that web viewer.
Five years ago when we started
mapping ash more in more
detail the big ash was okay
for town meeting day we want a map
on our wall of all the ash trees in town.
And really it was just like dots
that outlined our roads,
it wasn't useful data except
it look neat I guess.
And so now having an interactive map
where they could zoom in,
everyone wants to see their house.
So making that easy for people.
I think the trouble is still
that it's not easy to share at select
board meeting at 9:00 PM at night.
People just want
the handout in front of them.
So we do in our tool have
a print version where you can,
print the map extent,
even print a report about that tree,
here's everything that happened
and who did it and here's some pictures.
'Cause like eight and a half by 11
printouts still pretty handy.
Yeah.
[Attendee 4] Cool, thank you.
[Joanne] Carl.
[Carl] The US Forest Service has developed
a software called i-Tree,
which I'm sure you're familiar with.
Did you consider that in developing
your own inventory?
Are there pros and cons that you did one?
[Joanne] Surprisingly I'm not super familiar with it.
When I started using i-Tree I was using
it in really rural towns
and there wasn't enough information
for me 'cause they were like
largely forested towns when
this project started in 2013,
I wasn't there.
So I'm not sure what the interface
between the two was,
but it does mean that our information,
at least as far as I know someone
else might be able to tell
me better is gonna be
hard to just click a button
and wrap into i-Tree.
So there could have been some benefits there,
but it's not something
that's been hugely popular in Vermont yet.
And I think part of that has
to do with like the rural (indistinct).
[Carl] I think you might have been
pre i-Tree developing this.
-[Joanne] 2013. -[Carl] Yeah.
[Joanne] Could be.
Yeah, yeah.
And then like Burlington for example,
they're using their own platform.
So it'd be interesting to talk
to here to say like how do
you go from there to i-Tree,
which for folks who haven't seen i-Tree it
add a lot of ecosystem benefits of trees,
the short way of describing it.
[Attendee 5] Which is appropriate when, right.
That's the bigger question
I think is when would i-Tree be
the easier tool to use
and when would you call it the
municipal tree inventory is the name of the tool?
[Joanne] Yeah.
[Attendee 5] that would be really interesting
to see because one of my
questions is how do you prioritize
where you're going to inventory,
where you better assemble the troops
and what if somebody wanted to, I don't know,
what if a different state wanted to implement this?
Is this something
that A&R would share the tool or?
[Joanne] Yes, we do share it.
We used to keep,
if there's a username and password
to log in so that the software
is free, for anyone who wants to go to lunch
I totally understand.
(indistinct)
But, yeah, there's a username and password.
Every volunteer who uses the platform
uses the same username and password.
So it's not a secret,
but we did have it on our web page
and that ended up being a
bad idea 'cause folks other states
did use it and
started to like blow the back end of our system.
The way that we use this tool
is 98% opportunistic.
So that's why I put the list up
who's gone here because it takes
a person coming and saying,
"Hey, we are thinking about inventory, can you help?"
And right now it's still like,
it comes to my email and I feel like, yes,
when's a good time, let's assemble the crew.
We do have some targets to reach,
particularly some of these communities
that did an inventory
that's now seven, eight, nine years old
and need some updates.
We're talking with (indistinct) actually
about urban tree cover as
done by remote sensing
and drones and that particularly
noting change over time is
gonna be hugely useful.
But yeah, it's still very
like who's interested and
who's got a group on Sunday that wants to do this?
Schools sometimes publicly adults.
[Attendee 5] Yeah and and do you provide training?
I mean, how do you know that people
know the species and it's not (indistinct).
[Joanne] Oh yeah, they go and help 'em.
Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of fun.
I mean we meet, at the library or whatever
and walk around a fair bit
and then gives them some resources too.
But usually you end up with
like the people who know trees
really well, the people
who know apps really well,
(audience laughing)
those are not the same people.
And then someone like doesn't care
about trees or apps,
but they like to drive
and they wanna help and really it
works out.
But yeah, I get a lot of pictures
and sometimes, I don't know, it's great for me
to the urban trees can be kind of weird.
[Attendee 5] Yeah, yeah.
[Joanne] I know you had a question in just.
[Attendee 6] Well I think you asked the one,
it was basically,
is this shareable, the data, not the tool,
but is the data shareable or?
[Joanne] Yeah.
[Attendee 6] Are there restrictions on that?
[Joanne] What.
[Attendee 6] And the second part
of the question is can that be shared
with regulators, like regulatory agencies
within different states for responding
to invasive species and things like that?
[Joanne] Oh yeah, great question.
The data is shareable.
It used to be hosted on our PT A&R
(indistinct) natural resources atlas.
So literally the public could go in and see it.
We're not keeping it there
right now due to some technical
glitches I don't really understand.
But it'll get back up there.
You can when folks wanna export spreadsheets
and like get a little bit of backend help,
I tend to send it to them,
but it's on the VTA and our open data portal.
It's not secretive information
in any way, but it,
you have to understand, who did it,
what their parameters were when it happened.
If they didn't get to this tree,
there's no trees there,
maybe they just didn't get there.
So it has some of that backstory
and it tends to be most useful
for the municipalities and for us to be like,
hey, what's going on?
[Attendee 7] Citizen scientist program.
So for community science programs,
so there's gonna be some data gaps
and things like that.
-Lot that's-- -Yeah.
[Attendee 7] That's understandable.
And some mis-identification.
You definitely open one app
and you're like, that's fine.
-[Attendee 7] Yeah, yeah. -(audience laughing)
[Joanne] Yeah, yeah, it's a delight to work with folks
on the ground with the tool.
It's not the most efficient thing in the world,
but it's providing a lot of useful data
and this is the 2022 upgrade.
So tell your friends.
(audience laughing)
Thanks all.
(audience applauding)