LEOMINSTER — Did you know that every 1% increase in tree canopy cover brings about a 2% reduction in energy needs for cooling? And all the households in a neighborhood share this benefit, not just the ones with trees directly adjacent.
The Department of Conservation and Recreation, which manages state parks and oversees more than 450,000 acres throughout Massachusetts, continues to improve the vital connection between the community and the environment is on the front line of that important mission.
An important component of that mission is the DCR’s Greening the Gateway Cities Program, within Urban and Community Forestry.
This program is active in Brockton, Chelsea, Chicopee, Fall River, Haverhill, Holyoke, Lawrence, Leominster, Lynn, New Bedford, Pittsfield, Quincy, Revere and Springfield.
In Leominster the program is staffed by urban foresters Carolyn Streeter and Larissa Parse and forestry assistant Adam Barnard.
“I think that my love for forestry and trees and the connection I feel to the environment has been an evolution of my life’s experiences,” Streeter said. “Beginning when I was a kid playing in the woods to when I was a young adult, I have always loved spending time outside.”
Streeter, who lived in Alaska and in the mountains of New Mexico, studied forestry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and landed her first forestry job with a forest health program in Worcester.
“That was my first forestry job, and I just loved spending all day long in the woods with people who love trees and know a lot about trees,” she said.
DCR’s Urban and Community Forestry Greening the Gateway Cities Program is designed to reduce household heating and cooling energy use by increasing tree canopy cover in urban residential areas.
The DCR’s Bureau of Forestry and Fire Control Urban and Community Forestry crews, hired within local communities, plant trees in target neighborhoods for environmental, health, economic and energy efficiency benefits.
This program, concentrated in Environmental Justice neighborhoods, targets areas within Gateway Cities that have lower tree canopy, older housing stock, higher wind speeds and a larger renter population.
“In the spring and fall we plant trees on private and public property,” Streeter said. “In the summer and winter, we water and maintain the trees that we have planted on public property only; the rest is up to the private owners to maintain their trees. We remain available to residents to provide advice on caring for their new trees.”
Streeter said that while the program is planting trees this fall, in general things will look different than a typical fall season as planting will be scaled back because of the pandemic; however, they will remain busy continuing to water trees.
“We are in a Level 2 drought,” Streeter said. “It’s all we can do to water our public property trees, so we are doing a lot of watering right now and tree maintenance, maintaining the berm at the base of the tree so that I can put 20 gallons of water on each tree each week.”
All their efforts right now are focused on keeping the trees alive during this drought, Streeter stressed.
“Leominster is very sandy, and being an urban area it’s very hot, take the sand which drains water very fast, take the heat of the urban area and put a dry season, never mind a drought, on top of those things and watering is crucial,” she said.
Streeter encourages Leominster residents to protect trees.
“One way to protect trees is by watering them through this drought that we are now in,” she said.
“It is especially important to water the trees that are planted in between the sidewalk and the street because these sites are hot and receive extraordinarily little water when it rains. I encourage people to water their lawns less and their trees more.”
Streeter added that most lawns are cool-season grasses that want to go dormant in the heat of summer.
“Experiment with applying a half-inch of water every two weeks on the lawn. This often will keep the root system alive even though the grass blades will brown out,” she says. “I think of trying to keep a lawn green in summer as like trying to keep a tree from dropping its leaves in the fall. Trees go dormant in winter; lawn grasses go dormant in summer.”
So, forego the lawn watering and spend your water budget on the trees. Mowed lawns play almost no role in a healthy ecosystem compared to the critical roles that trees play.
“A more holistic way to protect nature is to start walking (with your cellphone turned off),” Streeter said with a smile. “Over time, spending time outdoors leads to a natural love for nature and a desire to preserve it. I do a lot of tree watering in French Hill. It is the people that I see walking all the time that tell me all about what birds are migrating through, what dragonflies and butterflies and sphinx moths are flying around this week versus last week, what interesting weeds are coming up along the sidewalks (chicory and St. John’s Wort, e.g.) and how dry they’ve noticed that the ground is this year.”
Streeter believes that trees are such an important component for the proper function of the planet’s climate system and its protection.
“The mature trees in our urban areas are a vital component of our community’s green infrastructure,” she says. “Removing a 60-foot tree and replacing it with a 6-foot tree is not a one-for-one trade. If the new tree survives, it will take decades to provide the host of benefits (that we need now) that the mature tree was providing.”
Streeter said that the rate of deforestation on the planet right now amounts to a forested area the size of the United Kingdom leaving the planet on a yearly basis, being highly unsustainable. She said to work against this by noticing, watering and advocating for the trees in your neighborhood.
“I read something in a newspaper article that resonates strongly with me in my daily work with trees,” she said. “The article was about the Wabanaki Confederacy. The Wabanaki are indigenous peoples of Maine and Canada. The article pointed out that the mindset of this community is one of having obligations to the natural environment rather than rights. This makes total sense to me in my mind and in my heart. I feel that I have obligations to the environment, not rights. This feels so clearly true to me because of what I’ve learned to appreciate after years of working outside, closely with trees, watching them sprout, grow, live, attempt to live against great odds and adversities, and die.”
“We need trees here,” Streeter stressed. “Trees clean the air we breathe, they clean the water we drink, they reduce noise and they improve the state of our mental health — and even though we manipulate our environment — trees belong here!”
For more information, visit maurbancanopy.org
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