A6.3 Urban tree canopy
Expand the region’s urban tree canopy.
The 2014 Olympia Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee’s Subcommittee on Urban Forestry’ Final Report makes a number of suggestions for improving Olympia’s urban forestry program, with references to examples in other cities, particularly volunteer organizations Portland has created to support its urban forests and fruit trees.
OpenTreeMap is an impressive piece of open source software that lets you map the trees in a city, display information about them, and lets volunteers add information about new trees. Philadelphia uses it, along with a number of other cities. (See also the Forest Service’s iTree Tools software, in section A 5.2 Community Forests.)
City Forest Credits, in Seattle, provides a mechanism through which companies can purchase verified City Forest Carbon + Credits to pay for the carbon sequestration from urban forestry projects, like this one in Shoreline. Seattle’s Trees for Neighborhoods program also provides free trees and assistance (if needed) to households who want to plant them.
The Cascadia Regional Network produced a report on preparing urban forests in the region for climate change and a paper on tree procurement.