Open Letter to Our Friends

Dear Friends at Friends of Trees,

First, thank you all for the hard work you do advocating for and planting trees in our beautiful cities.

Second, here are some of the measurable results of the work you do. Volunteers and Portland Parks & Recreation Urban Forestry staff inventoried all street trees within 20 neighborhoods in 2015. Street trees are trees planted in the city right-of-way, between the taxlot and the street. It took many volunteers countless hours plus additional staff time to collect data on 51,626 street trees. A good portion of these were planted by Friends of Trees. Data collected included tree type (species or genus), tree condition, tree size (diameter at breast height, 4.5 feet above the ground), planting site width, and presence of overhead high voltage wires. The data is being used to inform the creation of a Neighborhood Tree Plan to guide the communities, so that they can care for their trees.

Key Findings

This year, the neighborhoods included were Montavilla, Irvington, Powellhurst-Gilbert, Hazelwood, Buckman, Mt. Tabor, Roseway, King, Woodlawn, Mt. Scott-Arleta, North Tabor, Sabin, Parkrose, Parkrose Heights, and Old Town-Chinatown.
These neighborhood’s street tree populations consists of trees of 151 types.
Diversity in species and functional type is a concern; just Acer (Maple) Prunus (Cherry/Plum) make up 28% of the street tree population in these areas
Broadleaf deciduous trees account for 91% of all street trees.
Fifty-seven percent of all street tree planting spaces are currently stocked with trees, and 17,861 empty spaces are available for street tree planting, 5677 of which are high-priority large sites with no overhead wires.
For these neighborhoods, street trees produce $5,961,010 annually in environmental and aesthetic benefits. This calculates to approximately $114.26 in benefits per tree per year. The replacement value of this resource is $166 million dollars.
Over 68% of trees in large sites are too small for their site. Continued efforts to plant appropriately-sized trees in Portland’s rights-of-way will ensure that tree canopy and its benefits are maximized in the long-term.

We are looking forward to the 2016 Street Tree Inventory. We are focusing on a different group of neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are:

Alameda, Argay, Beaumont-Wilshire, Brentwood-Darlington, Creston-Kenilworth, East Columbia, Glenfair, Goose Hollow, Grant Park, Hollywood, Humboldt, Lents, Madison South, Pearl District, Reed, Rose City Park, Russell, and Wilkes

If you are interested in applying for the inventory, or want more information, please contact Patrick Key or Matthew Downs.

[email protected] or [email protected]