Tree Inventories: Preemptive and Proactive or Piecemeal and Reactive

Summary: Tree inventories fail or succeed from preemptive, proactive alignment or piecemeal, reactive misalignment of goals and objectives with benefits and costs.

Successful tree inventories provide significant details for effective urban forest planning; the project to plant one million trees in New York City emerged after the U.S. Forest Service's determination of New York's canopy cover at 24 percent, notably under the generally recommended canopy of at least 30 percent for urban settings: NaturalAreasNYC @NaturalAreasNYC, via Twitter Nov. 20, 2015

A tree inventory acts as a "record of the attributes (location and characteristics) of individual trees within a defined geographic area," according to the article Tree Inventories in Arborist News December 2017.

Jerry Bond, owner and consulting urban forester with Urban Forest Analytics, LLC, in Geneva, New York, bases tree inventory premises upon woody plants as manageable infrastructure. Tree inventories cover site features such as hardscaped fountains and walks, irrigation systems, plant-strip widths, putting greens, shrubs, utility poles and wires along with tree features. Characteristic and locational attributes of featured trees describe condition, diameter and species directly and quantitatively by instruments, such as diameter tapes for diameter at breast height.

Qualitative measurements of featured woody items contrastingly entail "somewhat arbitrary categories and individual judgment," such as of likelihood of failure, maintenance needs and tree structure condition.

Tree inventories furnish inventory reports of data quality and quantity by size or species categories in serial charts, lists, maps or tables retrievable as summary information.

Tree inventories give analyzed and summarized data implications, such as environmental impact of action or non-action and projected budget, maintenance and planting needs, in management plans. They have as their first step establishing goals and objectives whose priorities and requirements help hone data collection, database management and information-gathering, processing and management costs. Preconditions include data collection, management and maintenance-related funds and personnel; geographic limitations, such as rights-of-way; usability as dynamically correctable, updatable tools or as urban forest snapshots.

Tree inventories juggle community needs and resources against inventory objectives of tree characteristics, maintenance needs, work history and, urban forest management concern number one, risk assessment.

Inventory objectives keep to one overarching benefit in kickstarting proactivity from predominantly reactive operations through tree inventories' observable and predictive knowledge of site and tree attributes.

Tree inventories launch non-piecemeal, preemptive, proactive benefits in budget justifications, community relations, emergency preparedness, environmental well-being, litigation-related documentation, non-reactive pest responses, planting plans and work efficiency. They maximize accurate cost and task associations, appropriate disaster relief resource allocations, authoritatively documented actions that assist in litigation and aware publics concerning urban forest management. Their data and interpretations of size-class and species distributions and of stocking rate ratios of filled to available sites net disaster relievers and planting planners time.

The peer-reviewed, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service software suite i-Tree offers quantitative, not day-to-day management, tools of analysis and assessment for tree inventories.

The i-Tree tool components Canopy, Design, Eco, Hydro, Landscape and Species for eco-friendliest, site-specific groundcovers and Streets for dollar-valued environmental benefits promote preemptive, proactive tree inventories.

The author queues data-collection personnel into the article's cost-benefit analysis by quantifying low, low-medium, medium-high labor costs with poor-good, fair-good, good-excellent work accuracy in tree inventories. Training- and supervision-needy volunteers, semi-needy part-timers and temporaries and low-need full-timers and contractors respectively reveal low, low-medium and medium-high costs with poor-good, fair-good and good-excellent accuracy. He summarizes the three main inventory costs that sustain tree inventories as data-collection equipment and personnel, software needs, types and compatibility and maintenance history data ownership.

Tree inventories turn out as piecemeal, reactive and unsuccessful or as preemptive, proactive and successful as non-astute or perspicacious matches of benefits, costs, needs and objectives.

i-Tree is helpful for tree inventories; the U.S. Forest Service designed and developed the suite of i-Tree analytical and assessment applications as effective tools for quantifying and valuing tree ecosystem services: Northern Research @usfs_nrs, via Twitter Dec. 4, 2017

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to:
talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet;
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for on-campus and on-line resources.

Image credits:

Successful tree inventories provide significant details for effective urban forest planning; the project to plant one million trees in New York City emerged after the U.S. Forest Service's determination of New York's canopy cover at 24 percent, notably under the generally recommended canopy of at least 30 percent for urban settings: NaturalAreasNYC @NaturalAreasNYC, via Twitter Nov. 20, 2015, @ https://twitter.com/NaturalAreasNYC/status/667731391698878466

i-Tree is helpful for tree inventories; the U.S. Forest Service designed and developed the suite of i-Tree analytical and assessment applications as effective tools for quantifying and valuing tree ecosystem services: Northern Research @usfs_nrs, via Twitter Dec. 4, 2017, @ https://twitter.com/usfs_nrs/status/937675861993521152

For further information:

Bond, Jerry. December 2017. Tree Inventories. Arborist News 26(6): 12-17.

Hodgins, Jane. 16 November 2017. "i-Tree 2018 Updates Provide an Even Closer Look at Benefits of Urban Forests." USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station > NRS News > News Releases.
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