Written by Kelaine Vargas | 09 March 2010

Written by The Urban Forest Map | 15 February 2010

Since this is a collaborative project, we could use some collaboration! We’re looking for a short and sweet motto to feature on our home page in bold letters.

Here’s the basic mission of the project:

The Urban Forest Map is a collaborative project among city agencies, tree advocacy groups, and you -- the citizen foresters and nature lovers of San Francisco -- to build an inventory of San Francisco’s urban forest one tree at a time. Just log in online, click the map, and add the trees near you! For each tree added, we’ll calculate the environmental benefits its providing -- how many pounds of air pollutants it’s capturing, how much energy it’s helping conserve, how many gallons of stormwater it’s filtering, and how much carbon dioxide it’s removing from the atmosphere. As we build an inventory together, the information will help planners, city arborists, ecologists, tree advocates, and residents protect and grow the urban forest.

Here are a few thoughts for a motto that we had to help get the ball rolling:

• Tree by tree
• What trees are your neighbors?
• One tree at a time
• Turning gray into green!
• Map your urban forest!

So what do you think? Add your motto in the comments here, or on our Facebook Page, and we’ll take it into consideration! Thanks!

Written by Kelaine Vargas | 12 February 2010

It happens pretty often -- I’m out having dinner with friends, talking about this project and someone asks (usually with an eye roll), “Just what is the urban forest?” Followed by “I mean, really… Urban? Forest? I think that’s what we call an oxymoron.”

But there really is such a thing as the urban forest (after all, it has a Wikipedia entry, so it must be real [link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_forest]) and our cities would be much poorer without it.

For some people, the definition of an urban forest is the trees within a city.  But just like a wildland forest is more than just trees, I see the urban forest as:

• The trees
• The other vegetation (everything from the lawns of Golden Gate Park to the shrubs and flowers and grasses in our backyards to the tomato plants and pansies on a high-rise balcony)
• The soil supporting all of these
• The birds, animals, insects, microbes, fungi that make their homes among these

And that’s just form. The urban forest is about function too. It works to clean our air and water, fight climate change, conserve energy, and provide food and shelter for humans and other organisms.

For those who have trouble wrapping their brains around the concept of an urban forest -- try imagining a city without the trees. Pretty unimaginable, isn’t it?

Written by The Urban Forest Map | 04 February 2010

For our first blog post, it seems like it makes sense to talk first about how we got started on the Urban Forest Map. Amber and Kelaine have both worked in urban forestry for years--Amber from the community organization, nonprofit side and Kelaine more from the government, research side. But both of us saw the same difficulties in cities across the country (and we’re sure other countries have them too):

• Problems keeping up with tree inventories (tree people like to plant trees not enter data)
• Problems with technology (like proprietary software products with bad support or expensive software packages)
• Problems with lack of technology (we’ve seen cities where they keep tree records on index cards in drawers or in three-ring binders)
• Difficulties coordinating among different government entities (in San Francisco there are more than a dozen local, state, and federal agencies with jursidiction over trees)
• Neglect of the importance and value of trees on private property (for logistical and cost reasons these are rarely, if ever, counted in an inventory).

And yet, knowledge of the urban forest -- where the trees are, what species are represented, how old and healthy they are, the distribution of trees geographically -- has great value for planners, city foresters, ecologists, landscape architects, tree advocacy groups, and residents, too.

Our goal with the Urban Forest Map is to provide a one-stop repository for tree data, welcoming information from any agency or group and enabling and celebrating citizen participation. Together we’ll work toward building a complete, dynamic picture of the urban forest.