THE LEAFLET

Did you know we don’t have a comprehensive inventory of the trees on public park lands? Our tree inventories were designed to ameliorate this by using citizen science volunteers to identify, measure, and catalog the trees in D.C.’s parks. In conjunction with local land managers, the District Department of Parks and Recreation, the Urban Forestry Division and the National Park Service our volunteers have inventoried thousands of trees across D.C. Info collected during these inventories is essential to properly manage pests and disease, to plan for the future, and inform our planting practices.

With the help of over 200 volunteers we inventoried 6,378 trees across 55 different locations in 2017! Here are some of the highlights (photo highlights can be found on our Flickr page!):

The locations where we inventoried the most trees in 2017 were East Potomac Park Golf Course and George Washington University. We inventoried more than a thousand trees at each location! In third place was Takoma Recreation Center where we inventoried 352 trees.

This figure represents the top twenty tree genera with the largest total annual benefit in 2017. Total annual benefit represents the value of the ecosystem services that a tree provides for a single year. It is a combination of the trees carbon storage, carbon sequestration, avoided runoff, and pollution removal. The top 5 tree genera in 2017 by common name were Sycamore, Willows, Elms, Oaks and Beech.

This figure represents the top twenty tree genera with the largest structural value. Structural value represents the overall net worth of the ecosystem services that a tree provides across the trees entire lifetime. It is a combination of the trees carbon storage, carbon sequestration, avoided runoff, and pollution removal up to the moment in time when the tree was measured. The top 5 tree genera with the highest structural value in 2017 by common name were Willows, Oaks, Sycamores, Ginkgo’s, and Zelkovas.

Here is every tree we’ve inventoried the past two years – you can see the physical characteristics such as trunk size and health of the tree as well as some of the measurable benefits that tree provides such as carbon storage, avoided stormwater runoff and pollution removal.

Park Inventories will resume in Spring 2018 and there is plenty of time to sign up for open Inventories! In the meantime you can brush up on you tree identification skills by attending Trees 201.