i-Tree Eco project London

[David Humphries]

For those who are not involved but are interested, I will try and update the thread regarding the progress of the project.

 

As Nick elluded to, the training for the volunteers & team leaders has begun.

There is a wide mix of people involved from TO's & Tree proffessionals through to tree wardens, students, retirees & local open space user group members.

The London project is now regarded as being the largest City scale tree survey ever undertaken by volunteers with close on 300 people now involved.

 

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[David Humphries]

The training involves looking at the size of the 650 (randomly located) plots and the issues that may arise for the three member teams when they come to survey them.

 

The 11.3m radius plots (rough size in images below) will be marked out and have two landmarks tagged against the Tree measurement point.

 

data to be recorded will include;

 

% of area able to be plotted on the day

Total tree cover

% of shrub cover

Plantable space

 

Land use (residential, park, utility, Agri etc......)

Ground cover (bare soil, grass, trarmac etc...)

 

Tree & shrub information (Id, dimensions, % of crown dieback, light exposure etc....)

 

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[David Humphries]

There are roughly 150 of the 650 plots landing within private residential locations.

These addresses will be pre-notified of the visits to hopefully enable access.

 

When the Torbay survey took place only 2 out of the 70 plots that were within residential sites were unable to be recorded.

 

It will be interesting to see how Londons property owners/tennants react

 

On the day of the training the group were accosted by a grounds maintenance guy for 'trespassing' within his planting scheme

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[Nick Harrison]

Had an email from jim smith today saying there have been problems with his email account which would probably account for sloth not hearing back. Here jims new email address for the I-tree project as it may not be too late to register interest, [email protected]

[David Humphries]

Very interesting video from a Chief Economist (not a tree manager being the interesting bit) at TD Bank of Toronto, who is saying that the urban tree population within the that city has been valued at $7 billion

 

the interview starts after about 30 seconds of adverts, worth being patient.

 

Toronto's trees worth $7B - Lang & O'Leary Exchange - CBC Player

 

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[armybloke]

David, in terms of tree recording, as many others out there do, I have conducted twenty-eight BS5837 surveys in the Greater London Area since Mar 2014. It is a pity that client confidentiality and lack of time prevents 'us' (that's the royal us!) from collating tree data on a single spreadsheet.

 

As a point of interest from 1 Jan 2014 I have been keeping a record of trees inspected (including groups) and recording those lost/removed for development against those retained. Unfortunately I never get to see the final results of development to see how many trees are replaced (mitigation strategies include replacement in 99.9% of projects I deal with) on site or offered elsewhere within green space. Trouble is a lot of councils do not want the trees anymore as their areas of responsibility are now so divided they do not manage trees as they used to (eg, highways, green parks, open space, amenity areas, recreation etc, etc).

 

I will post my findings at the end of the year

[David Humphries]

I will post my findings at the end of the year

 

 

Here at the 'talk that is Arb' ?

 

 

I would find that of great interest

 

 

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[David Humphries]

Have come to the end of my involvement as a volunteer with the London iTree Eco project.

 

My team managed to get access to 9 of our 10 alloted plots.

 

We spent about 4 hrs a day across three days in the field collecting the data & an additional 4 hrs uploading the data to the website.

 

a few teething problems with the recording sheets but generally Ok.

 

Literally just finishing updating the site data to the iGiGl website. Will now wait to hear when all the info comes back in with the report, which will probably take a few months.

 

I'll post that up when I hear anything.

 

Fairly varied sites ranging from street, social housing, commercial, woodland, lakes & private gardens.

 

 

 

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[David Humphries]

One of our random plots landed where I work.

 

It's pretty amazing to see how some parts of London's treescape has changed over just the last century.

 

 

 

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[David Humphries]

A few snippets of info from the findings, as reported by Kenton Rogers from Treeconomics at the Big Barn Conference at Barchams a couple of weeks ago.

 

 

London has 21% canopy cover which compares well against other major European cities.

 

The city is roughly broken down in to;

30% residential

20% park

8% transport

7% commercial

5% institution

1% cemetary

1% wetland

1% vacant

 

The predominant tree species found was (surprisingly I thought) Betula

followed by;

Malus

Tilia

Acer

Platanus

Quercus

Crataegus

45% others

 

The above figures make London the most diverse urban forest in th UK

 

 

Not an awful lot to chew on at this point, as this was really just a taster/snap shot.

 

We're still waiting on the release of the full report.

 

I'll update more when I can.

 

 

 

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