In the past few years more than 12,000 dead Ash trees have been cut down in Cincinnati on publicly-owned land. According to documentary filmmaker Andrea Torrice, Cincinnati almost went broke trying to keep the invasion from damaging property and endangering citizens. In describing the infestation, she said, “It seemed to happen overnight.” Unfortunately, Cincinnati is not unique. Since emerald ash borer (EAB), an invasive Asian beetle, was first identified in 2002, communities all across the country have reported signs of EAB and face losing huge portions of their tree canopy. In total, it’s estimated EAB will kill between 50 to 100 million ash trees in the US and Canada.

The risk of emerald ash borer, however, is not just limited to canopy loss. The effects ripple through the ecosystem affecting other plants, animals and water supplies. Emerald ash borers eat tree bark and cut off access to the nutrients and water a tree needs to survive, and can kill an ash tree in as little as two years. Efforts aimed at reducing the spread of invasive species like EAB have proved costly for businesses that sell ash trees or wood products, property owners, and local and state governments alike.

We sat down with award-winning documentary filmmaker, Andrea Torrice to discuss her most recent film, Trees in Trouble. The film, which is set in Cincinnati, tells the story of America’s urban and community forests: their history, their importance to our health, economy and environment, and the threats they face today. Like many citizens, Torrice was not familiar with the spread of EAB and its impact on her neighborhood until she began to notice swaths of dead trees spray-painted for removal. Upon gaining a deeper understanding of the issue, she felt compelled to create a film that brought the issue to national attention. Torrice weaves together urban forestry history, public policy and science with personal stories to create a film designed to appeal to people of all ages.

In addition to raising key questions about the challenges our forests face amidst climate change and the spread of invasive species, Trees in Trouble serves to educate citizens on the social, economic, environmental and health benefits trees provide. Throughout our conversation, Torrice was quick to highlight solutions communities can take to protect native trees such as increased monitoring and public awareness, all in an attempt to offer hope for the future. Torrice said, “Education about and awareness of EAB is a necessary first step in order to get citizens involved in the long-term preservation of our urban forests.” She encourages citizens to advocate for updated tree ordinances and to let their public officials know they support funding for the care and maintenance of our urban forests. At the same time, she acknowledges that local government cannot solve the problem alone.

In Cincinnati, for instance, a mandate requires the city to remove all infested ash trees on public land. The cost and scale of this removal project means the city can only afford to replant one tree for every three lost. Stories like this are not limited to Cincinnati, which is why Torrice believes the most successful initiatives to mitigate the effects of EAB are those that bring together multiple stakeholders.

The Taking Root initiative, which brought together 220 diverse organizations and partners across Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, was started in response to the spread of EAB. The goal of the campaign is to address the current historic loss of our region’s tree canopy by planting trees, better managing local forests, promoting the benefits of healthy trees, and fostering a sense of stewardship among individuals and communities.

Ultimately, better management of our urban forests starts with a clear understanding of the trees in your inventory. Information on tree condition and biodiversity as well as ecosystem benefit calculations provide actionable insights for municipalities on where to focus finite resources, and can help local governments advocate for budget increases. Our urban canopy is a testament to the foresight and commitment of past generations, and without proper attention to the long-term care of trees we risk leaving future generations with substantially fewer trees.

Click here to see when Trees in Trouble is airing in your area.

Earlier this year, we launched a new “modular pricing” model—the change is significant for several reasons, and it’s worth explaining the observations that led us to totally revamp the way we sell OpenTreeMap. This new direction represents our strong commitment to making OpenTreeMap accessible and affordable for the folks who need it most.

Most Software as a Service (SaaS) companies like OpenTreeMap sell “plans” in monthly or yearly installments. At various points in our history we had between 3-5 plans—each successively more expensive plan came with more capacity for trees and more features. With our most popular plan, customers could upload up to 50,000 trees and could access premium features like our iOS and Android Mobile apps. For many companies, this pricing structure works. It is easy to understand and simple to implement. But at OpenTreeMap, we saw a fundamental problem: urban forestry initiatives can’t simply be boiled down to the number of trees in any given inventory. Every city, non-profit, university and consulting arborist has a different set of priorities and needs. Our pricing model could not accommodate the breadth of applications that our customers found for the software.

Take, for instance, The Greening of Detroit. With a dedicated corps of interns and volunteers, they inventoried nearly 15,000 trees using OpenTreeMap’s mobile apps over the last year alone. The Greening of Detroit continues to be one of the most active and fast-growing tree maps in the country. With our former pricing plan, they had to pay for thousands of additional trees that they had not even mapped. Now, they only pay for the number of trees they need. They’ve been able to reallocate money formerly spent on unused tree capacity to get our Customization module. This way they can customize stewardship activities, user roles, and the mobile app configuration. Now they pay less than they used to and are able to get features previously only available to people with hundreds of thousands of trees.

It’s our sincere hope that the new pricing model will make OpenTreeMap attainable for those groups that have never had access to premium software for collecting, managing, and showcasing urban forest data. It is these groups that benefit most from OpenTreeMap. Small cities with 10,000 street trees and a dedicated group of volunteers now don’t have to pay $40,000 for a basic inventory—they can engage volunteers willing to collect the data instead. And non-profits with hundreds or thousands of trees planted each year can easily report on those plantings to donors and conduct survivability studies with just a few summer interns.

We’re proud to help clients like Augusta University, who can now afford to use OpenTreeMap to manage an inventory of several thousand trees without breaking their budget and Sustainable JC, who plotted their first several hundred trees in a single weekend. If you aren’t using software to better track and understand what’s happening to your trees, there has never been a better time to try OpenTreeMap. Get started with a 30 day free trial today: www.opentreemap.org/pricing/.

Coordinating a street tree census in the biggest city in the United States is exciting and challenging. Jacqueline Lu, the Director of Data Analytics at NYC Parks, discusses how NYC Parks developed and conducted TreesCount! 2015. Deborah Boyer from Azavea describes the software used to gather the data and how digital tools can assist with large-scale urban forestry data collection. We received a lot of great questions during the webinar and have compiled answers to some of the most common questions below.

Is the TreesCount! 2015 software available for other municipalities?

TreesCount! is an open source project and the code is freely available at https://github.com/azavea/nyc-trees. Software development experience will be needed to set up the code, and the mapping process relies on the existence of a file of street block edges for your city or town. For groups without the technical capacity or budget to set up the code, OpenTreeMap may be another solution. OpenTreeMap is a cloud-based platform for helping groups map trees, track stewardship activities, and engage the community around caring for the urban forest. Although it does not include the event management features available in TreesCount!, it does support volunteer mapping as a citizen science initiative.

Why did NYC Parks conduct a volunteer-led tree inventory? Was TreesCount! more expensive than hiring an independent contractor?

NYC Parks’ goal was not simply to collect tree inventory data. From the project’s inception, they also focused on encouraging citizens to engage with the urban forest through the census. If the goal was to get data only, it likely would have been more cost effective to hire contractors to use satellite imagery to plot trees or complete an on-the-ground tree survey. NYC Parks’ focus on citizen engagement was central to the design and functioning of the software Azavea created for them.

Azavea team members volunteering with NYC TreesCount! 2015.

Are ecosystem benefits incorporated into the data?

The TreesCount! software does not calculate ecosystem benefits. After the 2005 census, NYC Parks’ ran the gathered inventory data through the U.S. Forest Service’s iTree Streets (formerly STRATUM) and they plan to complete a similar process with the 2015 data. The software platform for TreesCount! was focused on supporting Parks’ staff, individual volunteers, and partner organizations in their effort to inventory trees. The data was collected so that little manipulation is required for upload into iTree Streets and other analysis tools.

Were there areas that volunteers could not survey due to concerns about personal safety or data quality?

Before sending volunteers into the field, NYC Parks identified block edges where they thought there may be access issues or that would be challenging for volunteers to survey. Challenges included but were not limited to the location of the street, the direction of the street, and the existence of trees in a median. These areas were set aside for volunteers with advanced training or NYC Parks staff. There were also instances where expert surveyors visited a site and determined that the area was too dangerous to survey (example: trees located on a narrow median on a multi-lane street). The project excluded private streets, which fall outside the Parks’ jurisdiction.

How did NYC Parks encourage safety while mapping?

NYC Parks’ encouraged volunteers to map in pairs and groups, and all volunteers wore bright green vests designating them as a volunteer surveyor. Mapping events were often co-sponsored by partner organizations familiar with the area and were generally accessible via public transit.

How did NYC Parks’ deal with naturally occurring or self-seeding trees?

TreesCount! 2015 was explicitly focused on mapping planted street trees located along street block edges. The surveying methodology worked well for single trees along streets and was not as well suited for gathering data on groups of trees that may appear due to natural regeneration.

What does the NYC Parks define as a sign of stewardship?

A sign of stewardship is defined as evidence that a tree received tending or maintenance by someone. This can include tree guards, signs of proper pruning, flowers planted in the tree bed, and mulching. These categories of stewardship were taken from a study NYC Parks completed in 2006 on the effect of stewardship on tree growth and mortality. The study concluded that visible more signs of stewardship for a tree often resulted in greater longevity for that tree, especially when the tree was younger or newly planted.

How were volunteers trained?

Before mapping, all volunteers completed an online training and then received field training from NYC Parks staff or a partner organization. Training materials can be viewed online at https://treescount.nycgovparks.org/static/training/TreesCount2015Training.pdf

Los Angeles poses a unique mix of urban environmental challenges. It is the second largest city by population in the US, but it lacks a truly walkable, bikeable, transit-friendly urban core like first-place New York or third-place Chicago. Instead, Angelenos are settled quite uniformly across the whole region. These two factors contribute to L.A. having more vehicles per square mile than any other urbanized area. All those cars and trucks demand wide swathes of asphalt and concrete, which generate a formidable “urban heat island” effect that raises temperatures in an already hot Southern California climate. On bad days, the extra heat can cook these vehicle emissions into a soupy smog – giving L.A. the worst air quality of any major American city. Access to water, too, is a challenge in the hot climate. L.A. must import a staggering 85% of the water it uses from surrounding communities.

“Suffice it to say, it’s not awesome where our water comes from, what we use it for, or how much of it we use.”, said Danny Carmichael, the Senior Manager of Forestry Projects at TreePeople, the tree-planting and conservation nonprofit in Los Angeles behind TreeMapLA.org.

As TreePeople’s work in the areas of urban forestry and green infrastructure can attest, L.A.’s stressed environment is not without effective solutions. Urban trees and other green infrastructure like green roofs, bioswales, and rain barrels can bring relief to the hot, smoggy, parched Los Angeles climate with their cooling shade, air cleansing, and water filtration powers. TreePeople has been planting trees in the region for over 40 years. The organization also pushes for other types of green infrastructure and “forest-mimicking technologies” as part of the “Functioning Community Forest” model it has developed. All of TreePeople’s activities are aimed at its mission of inspiring and supporting people with resources to take personal responsibility for improving the urban environment of Los Angeles.

TreePeople began using the OpenTreeMap Cloud platform in March of this year to grow and steward TreeMapLA.org, which will eventually be a map of all the trees and green infrastructure in greater Los Angeles. TreePeople’s focus on inspiring individuals to care for the urban environment is a great fit for the crowdsourced approach to urban forest inventory that OTM and the mobile apps for iOS and Android enable. “Our bread and butter is working with volunteers. Every single weekend we have 4-5 volunteer events, whether that’s tree planting, tree care, mountain restoration work, or educational workshops,” said Danny. “We have a lot of practice in getting folks out and getting them excited.”

TreeMapLA is a pioneer, as it is the first OpenTreeMap site to be tracking trees as well as other green infrastructure projects (what TreePeople calls “Watershed Solutions”) like rain barrels, rain gardens, and green roofs or concrete reductions.

“We would love to see where these features are,” said Danny. “Who has rain gardens? Can we go in and do a workshop where we have a whole street that has rain gardens and rain barrels?”

While TreePeople sees the potential for innovative programming around green infrastructure down the road, most of their activity in the past several months since TreeMapLA launched has been mapping trees. When the map launched in March, TreePeople set a public goal of mapping 1,000 trees before month’s end – a target that was rapidly met and exceeded by an initial wave of enthusiastic users. In the months since then, Danny and his team have experimented with several tree mapping events, including a new event format they’re calling “Thirsty Thursdays,” where volunteers do tree mapping after work for a few hours before heading to a neighborhood bar.

“We’re putting all our energy right now behind drought response activities,” said Danny, referencing the crushing drought Califonia has been struggling with. Danny said the initial idea for Thirsty Thursdays was to engage volunteers to help water the trees, as a social activity. “So [we would] water trees, and water humans with some alcoholic libations.” But through the course of planning that type of an event – carrying out site visits, getting a sense of what the tree watering needs in certain neighborhoods are – Danny realized TreeMapLA could make the events more successful and play an effective role as a planning tool. “[We are] going out and doing [Thirsty Thursday] events as the first touch, where it basically becomes a site visit,” he said. “We can go into those communities and get a better sense of what the needs are, so that we can go back a month later and tackle those needs.”

Thirsty Thursdays have started small, with about 10 volunteers each time, but Danny hopes to get up to 20-30 volunteers after the word about treemapping has spread. “”When I talk to the folks that do come, they are just sort of taking a chance. [They] don’t really know what it is or what it entails,” said Danny, “but after going through the process of mapping trees for a couple of hours, they’re really excited.”

Treemapping events like Thirsty Thursdays, have required rethinking TreePeople’s expectations for volunteer events. “Doing tree care, tree plantings in the city, that we have down to a science. We know how many folks we need, for how many trees, and how big an area we can hit” in the right amount of time, Danny explained to me. “But [with treemapping] I have very much been experimenting to figure out what is realistic.”

Thirsty Thursdays in particular are an experimental departure from TreePeople’s normal programming because they are held on weekday evenings, after work, and for a shorter time of two hours. “We expected it would be different, but we’re also seeing the people who are using TreeMapLA and the people that we’re hoping will be excited about it are a different demographic than our usual volunteers,” said Danny. “We’re hoping by making it more of a social thing, we can really reach those people better.”

Danny and TreePeople have also held larger tree mapping events on Saturday mornings, a more traditional volunteering time. These events take place over three hours. So far, three events have been organized in Downtown LA, Culver City, and Glendale, with about 15 volunteers at each.

In Downtown LA, TreePeople was working with a community group that is working on a master tree plan. “[We were] trying to figure out where the trees are, and where the empty planting spaces are, so they can figure out what they need to do to add more trees, and where the tree care needs are,” explained Danny. At this event, TreePeople mapped 165 trees, the most at any event. That’s nearly one tree every minute!

The Culver City event was with a group that is trying to protect a unique park. “It’s actually a traffic median that is also a park, and the city is proposing to widen the road that it’s next to,” said Danny. The community group wanted to map the park’s trees in TreeMapLA and use OpenTreeMap’s i-Tree Streets ecosystem services calculations to show the economic and other benefits of the trees to the city. “Hopefully that will change the arguments that the city is making,” and make the case for replanting those trees or reconsidering the course of the road, Danny explained.

TreePeople was also approached by EarthWatch, an international nonprofit, and organized a treemapping event near Glendale. “We were working on a citizen science project where we were gathering leaf samples, and those are going to be used by some university researchers to infer the growth rate and water use of these trees,” said Danny. EarthWatch wants to gather data across L.A. and compare it to NASA satellite data, “so that they can get a better sense of what species are doing well where in the city, so that moving forward, we can be smarter about what trees we are planting where,” explained Danny.

As he explained these events to me, Danny realized that all of TreePeople’s larger treemapping events had been organized as partnerships with other groups, rather than TreePeople going out with its regular volunteer programs. The Downtown LA and Culver City groups were previous TreePeople volunteers, which then came up with the idea of using TreeMapLA to advance their own projects.

“That’s our model: finding motivated people and giving them the knowledge and tools they need to inspire their communities to take personal responsibility for the urban forest,” said Danny. “Those two instances are sort of our dream.”