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What is a Tree Worth? Wilson Quarterly Winter 2011

Very nice historical perspective with rich detail about the progression of measuring urban forest benefits and the people who measure them.

Several of the folks profiled in the article are both friends and colleagues:

What Is a Tree Worth?

by Jill Jonnes

Trees brighten city streets and delight nature-starved urbanites. Now scientists are learning that they also play a crucial role in the green infrastructure of America's cities.

On April 8, 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt, attired in a dark suit and top hat, could be found in Fort Worth, Texas, where youngsters looked on from a nearby window as he shoveled soil over the roots of a sapling. It was Arbor Day, which schools across the nation had recently begun commemorating, and the ever vigorous president was demonstrating his hands-on love of trees. For Roosevelt, Arbor Day was no publicity stunt. In an address to America's schoolchildren a couple of years later, he celebrated "the importance of trees to us as a Nation, of what they yield in adornment, comfort, and useful products." He saw trees as vital to the country's well-being: "A people without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as hopeless."

...

The Chicago study introduced a radically new way to think about city trees, even for those who had been thinking about urban forests for years. Ray Tretheway, longtime head of the Sacramento Tree Foundation, a nonprofit tree-planting organization, vividly remembers hearing McPherson speak at an urban forestry conference in 1991. "He just blew me away," Tretheway recalls. "These tree benefits, I'd never heard of this before." After meeting with McPherson and Rowntree, Tretheway persuaded the U.S. Forest Service to open a new research station in Davis, not far from Sacramento. With the Chicago study concluded, McPherson headed to California to become head of the station's Center for Urban Forest Research. The University of California, Davis, provided a source of graduate students to carry out the research.

Tretheway acquired a wealth of studies and new data from McPherson and other tree scientists, who in the late 1990s worked up a detailed portrait of Sacramento's five million trees and their numerous benefits. McPherson's graduate student Qingfu Xiao did pioneering research on the impact of trees on stormwater dispersal - an expensive problem for the many cities faced with federal mandates to upgrade their sewerage and water systems - by measuring how much rainfall trees of various species and sizes intercepted.

When McPherson had come west, he found under way in Sacramento a real-life study of how trees save energy. In 1989, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District had been forced by outraged voters to close its dysfunctional Rancho Seco nuclear plant. To reduce its peak load, the electric utility's new, tree-loving CEO, S. David Freeman, had partnered with Tretheway's foundation to plant half a million young trees for free in the yards of residential customers over the course of a decade.

...

Check it out!

:o)

Dan

Here is a link that might be useful: Link to article.

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