Workshop Series for Urban Forestry Management
These workshops balance comprehensive classroom lecture with field discussions. All courses have ISA continuing education units ranging from eight to twenty-four units and are offered either as a regional Natural Path Urban Forestry Consultant workshop or as an on-site workshop tailored to your needs.
Available workshops:
- Tree Inventories: From Design and Implementation to Management
- Tree Risk Management Policy Development
- Species Diversity
Tree Inventories: From Design and Implementation to Management
Duration: 4 days, consecutive or divided over a year
Natural Path Urban Forestry has developed a comprehensive workshop on tree inventories and their use. Designed in three distinct modules, the workshops can be presented either as independent workshops or an integrated four-day series – presented consecutively or over a year. The modules cover three distinct phases of the tree inventory process. Participation at each module will be a function of where a community is in the inventory process. The three modules are Design, Implementation and Management.
Tree inventories are an important management tool for communities. They are used not only to track work being done on individual trees, but more importantly, they provide the foundation for establishing short and long-term maintenance and management goals. Unfortunately, most inventories, once completed, are either underused or ignored. This session strives to reinvigorate communities that have existing inventories or desire to implement one. The talk focuses on how data from an inventory can help establish, among other things, cyclic pruning programs, species diversity, and risk management programs. In addition to these programs, the inventory is a key element for gauging change over time – critical for evaluating a community's overall program.
Tree Risk Management Policy Development
Duration: 1 day
As arborists, consultants and urban foresters we deal with the question of risk on a regular basis. The two main goals concerning hazard trees in the last fifteen years has been on learning how to assess hazard trees and understanding the liability associated with managing trees. A third and final element to the discussion on hazard trees, this session focuses on risk and how we, as a profession that maintain and manage large numbers of trees, can develop progressive risk reduction strategies that are achievable, defensible and reasonable. We as a profession must be comfortable with our ability to make intelligent choices and assumptions about trees and act on our knowledge and experience.
The first part of the session will discuss how to use simple parameters to identify the high-risk features in the tree population being managed. For a commercial arborist this information helps refine higher services for your residential client base. For the municipal forester the simple assessments allow one to focus on the features of the population that pose the highest risk to the general public.
The second half of the session will outline an eight-point model for implementing a tree risk management strategy.
Species Diversity
Duration: 1 day
Species diversity is often touted as an important component of an urban forestry program, but what does diversity really mean in an urban environment and how does a city implement such a program? This workshop addresses both issues by first giving a brief overview on the history of the topic followed by a seven-step process for long-term diversification. We as managers of urban streetscapes invariably are dealing with a large number of trees planted decades ago that would now be considered inappropriate (for example, Silver Maple and Siberian Elm). Much of ones current maintenance budget is devoted to maintaining these trees. Current planting programs that offer a very narrow focus for the community have a tendency to promulgate near monoculture plantings and, over time, actually reduce the number of diverse species in the population.
Enacting a species diversity program implies three actions: Overused species are minimized in emphasis; underused species are increased in emphasis; and new species are introduced into the landscape. To achieve each of these elements, seven clear tasks are required. The first task focuses on evaluating the current and potential tree resource. The remaining tasks outline a systematic process for establishing thresholds for each species and circulating species in and out of the annual planting list. The outcome of the session is a clearly defined quantifiable process for achieving species diversity in a community.
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