Friends of Trees needs YOUR help this summer!
By Kris Day
Want to help foster tree stewardship in your neighborhood? Interested in getting to know the new trees around your block?
Does contributing to a huge, ongoing, citizen-science research project sound neat? Want to do any of these things wearing a super-cool Friends of Trees T-shirt?
If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, volunteer to be a Summer Inspector with Friends of Trees!
Friends of Trees will have planted nearly 4,500 new street and yard trees by the time this year’s plantings wrap up, so we’re looking at managing our biggest monitoring season ever.
Each year we work with dozens of volunteers to inspect every tree planted through our Neighborhood Trees program not once, but twice, during the dry months of their first summer in the ground. More than ever before we need YOUR help!
Beyond collecting survivability data, each inspection provides an opportunity to give feedback to new tree owners on what they’re doing right to care for their new trees as well as what they might do better. This contributes greatly to Friends of Trees’ enviable 96.5% survival rate for all first-year trees—a result that we work hard to maintain.
Don’t worry. Despite our having thousands of new trees to inspect, Friends of Trees doesn’t give each Summer Inspector a list of hundreds of trees to check up on. Rather, we group new trees into routes of about 30, so they can be visited on foot or by bike in a couple of hours. We provide Summer Inspectors with all the basic information needed to perform this task during a detailed training complete with a field session led by local arborists.
Trainings will be held between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Saturday, May 7, at the Holy Redeemer School in North Portland (127 N Rosa Parks Way) (map) and Saturday, May 14, in SE Portland (St. Paul Lutheran Church, 3880 SE Brooklyn Street). (Note: You only need to attend one session.)
Friends of Trees will supply coffee, breakfast treats, pizza, and a free Tree Team organic cotton T-shirt. You’ll learn how to assess the health of trees with our user-friendly data collection forms and how to upload your findings online. Register online here to reserve your spot on this year’s Summer Inspector Team.
For fun, here are a few interesting tidbits from last year’s monitoring report for the 2009-2010 Friends of Trees planting season:
Total trees planted in Portland, Beaverton, Gresham & Vancouver: 3,750
Number of fruit trees planted in Portland: 285 (23 different varieties)
Number of conifers planted: 92 (7 different species)
Most popular tree species: Rocky Mountain Glow Maple (212), Green Vase Zelkova (174), Japanese Snowbell (109), Persian Ironwood (106), and Paperbark Maple (102).
Hope to see you in May at one of the trainings!
–Day is Neighborhood Trees Contractor Specialist for Friends of Trees.