Pete Stidman

JAMAICA PLAIN GAZETTE

Lost somewhere in the events of the dusty side street fracas between tree activists and a local developer over a stand of trees on Grotto Glen were the real facts about JP’s tree canopy. Where does it stand? Where is it going? Why is it important? Trees are becoming a hot topic in other urban areas across the country as municipalities begin to grasp the leafy entities’ monetary value.

City and state governments most commonly associate trees with cleaning up the air we breathe, storing carbon dioxide and helping out with storm water drainage. Recent studies have also linked trees to raising property values, reducing domestic violence, calming children with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder and even raising self-esteem in adolescent girls, among other benefits.

“It kind of confirms what most of us in the field already knew,” said Sherri Brokopp from Boston College’s Urban Ecology Institute. “If you’re out on a sunny 100-degree day and you have an option of walking down a street with concrete and cars honking versus a street with trees and vegetation that provide you with a buffer from the traffic, we would choose to walk under the tree, right?”

The forest service last estimated Boston’s canopy, or total tree coverage, in 1995 at 22.3 percent. This compares to a two-year-old study that put Washington DC at 28.6 percent and NewYork City at 21 percent. However, the same study, conducted by the non-profit conservation organization American Forests (AF), revealed that out of three dozen urban areas, not including Boston, most had their canopy reduced by around 30 percent in the last 25 years. This could indicate that Boston’s canopy has shrunk significantly.

“East of the Mississippi, a city should have at least a 40 percent canopy overall,” said Cheryl Kollin, director of urban forestry at AF, “recognizing also that more urban areas will have fewer trees and suburban areas will have a bit more.” The range, she said, can go from 10 percent in the most urban areas to 50 percent in the suburbs.

Other cities have taken action against the trend. San Francisco’s municipal government passed an ordinance that will protect trees of a certain size by allowing them to be designated as landmarks, even if they grow on private property.

Officials in Tampa, Fla. changed their urban forest ordinance when one homeowner chopped down an enormous laurel oak on his front lawn, only to sell out to a condo developer within months. The new law now prevents lumberjack homeowners from selling their denuded properties for two years after yelling, “Timber!”

In Boston, the Parks and Recreation Department has a mandate to protect the trees on city-owned land. They also pass judgement on projects adjacent to parkland, often making compromises with developers. There are no city ordinances governing trees on private property.

According to Parks spokesperson Mary Hines, Boston’s parks department oversees around 80,000 trees. The much larger metropolitan area was estimated to contain around 1.4 million trees in 1995. The current figure isn’t known.

“The city [loses] more trees than they plant,” said Eric Seaborn of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. “But as for specific data, we’re in the process of getting that.”

Brokopp’s Community Forest Partnership at BC and a number of other organizations, including Seaborn and other city, state and federal urban foresters have combined into the Boston Urban Forest Coalition (BUFC).

The BUFC hopes to complete a new measurement of the city’s tree canopy by October. Using a ground-level count of 217 randomly-chosen plots in the city, combined with detailed aerial photos taken by the forest service last spring, the group will extrapolate a figure that will define where the city sits on green cover.

With that knowledge, the group can estimate the dollar value of the services the trees provide, and hopefully form a basis for community partnerships to plant and care for more of them.

“You have to take the time to build community support before you make a goal,” said Seaborn. “After these studies are done we’ll be able to extrapolate and find a forest cover level that we think would be appropriate for the city.”

To follow the group’s progress see the groups website at www.bostonforest.org, currently under construction.