THE LEAFLET

October 15, 2019 /
Jona Elwell

Spreading Aloha with DAWSON at Their Day of Service

We love when organizations set aside time to join together as a group and spend a day out of the office beautifying, improving, or learning more about the environment in which they live and work. We love it even more when they chose to spend their day with us restoring, enhancing, and protecting D.C.’s tree canopy. 

Therefore, we were pumped to have DAWSON participate in our Lafayette Park Inventory as their Day of Service. They came out on a sunny Saturday (!) afternoon and brought great energy and humility.

Taking off their client solutions hats and putting on their citizen science hats their tireless work cataloging, measuring, and identifying trees in the park is not only appreciated but also necessary to complete the immense amount of work we have to do in our nation’s capital.

We spent our time laughing, learning, and contributing to D.C.’s tree canopy, which is key because Lafayette Park is home to some major urban forest workhorses. Together with DAWSON, we inventoried a whopping 138 trees and saw 40 different species. The most common trees included the Cherry, American Holly, Crapemyrtle and White Oak. The trees in this space have a structural value of $867,000 and their overstory covers 2.214 acres.  In Lafayette Park, about 77% of the trees are species native to North American. Species exotic to North American make up 23 percent of the population, 13% of which are native to Asia. The largest tree was a Red Oak with a DBH of 52.2 inches, placing its age to approximately 300 years old. Astounding to think this tree might have seeded while Louis XIV of France was in power and Benjamin Franklin was just been born.

Interested in partnering with us for your organization or group’s Day of Service? Get in touch with us.