Vibrant Cities & Urban Forests

We are in the thick of year-end craziness here at the Green Cities office, but a really exciting report was released recently and we couldn’t just say nothing. A few of our staff members were even lucky enough to be present at the unveiling last month in Orlando, Florida, at the national Partners in Community Forestry conference. The report is a call to action created by the Vibrant Cities & Urban Forests Task Force: a group of 25 leaders in urban and community forestry “experts and innovators” from across the country.

Here is what the Alliance for Community Trees has to say:

“Bringing together the observations and recommendations of 25 experts across multiple disciplines, the Vibrant Cities Report presents a new framework for understanding the benefits of urban and community forestry.”

The report issues 12 recommendations for action across the country:

1. Create a national education and awareness campaign.
2. Foster urban forestry and natural resources stewardship and volunteerism.
3. Create sustainable jobs in urban forestry and green infrastructure.
4. Cultivate partnerships between public and private sectors.
5. Develop new public administration models for urban ecosystems.
6. Create comprehensive multi-jurisdictional Urban Regional Natural Resource Plans.
7. Integrate federal agencies’ green infrastructure goals.
8. Establish energy efficiency programs that emphasize the use of trees.
9. Ensure equal access to urban forestry and green infrastructure resources.
10. Support urban ecosystem-focused, collaborative research.
11. Encourage open access to and use of social assessment tools
12. Establish national Vibrant Cities Standards.

Take a look at the report and let us know what you think! We are excited to see how these recommendations play out in the future of leveraging the importance of healthy urban environments and community involvement in programs like Green Cities.

Working for a healthy forest and a strong community

Cascade Land Conservancy’s own Weston Brinkley talks about the research he is doing in partnership with the Pacific Northwest Research Station. His study looks at what motivates the volunteers who are working across the region to keep our forests, wetlands, meadows, prairies, and other natural areas healthy. This includes our Green Cities, and also countless other volunteer organizations. Volunteer projects donate hundreds of thousands of hours a year to restoration, and represent a huge investment of resources by the organizations that support them. We are looking forward to research like this encouraging programs to better support our amazing volunteers while keeping up the region’s environmental health.

This video was posted by Kate Burke and Branden Fitzpatrick on the University of Oregon’s Science Stories initiative website. There are a lot of other interesting articles on there too – check out more!

Pest Monitoring In Our Urban Forests

Learn how to protect your healthy forest ecosystem by participating in a citizen survey searching for exotic woodboring beetles. This training hosted by the Cascade Land Conservancy (CLC) will have expert facilitators from Washington State Department of Agriculture and USDA – Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services. This is a free training, open to Forest and Habitat Stewards and anyone interested in learning about how to protect our forest ecosystems from exotic woodboring beetles. Also, this course is sponsored for WSDA pesticide and Structural Pest Inspector Recertification Credits. By attending this training Washington State Licensees can receive four recertification credits.

Two trainings will be provided, and will cover the same information presented at trainings in August 2010 (in Seattle) and March 2011 (in Tacoma). Feel free to attend the trainings again if you need a review or had difficulties in the field examining for damage or filling out the ALB Survey Data Form.

The first training will be November 4, 2011 from 10 am to 2 pm in Tacoma at Pt. Defiance Lodge.

The second training will be November 18, 2011 from 12:30 pm to 4:30 pm in Seattle at Seward Park Audubon Center.

Please contact Jennifer Chang, South Sound Green Cities Project Associate, at jenniferc@cascadeland.org or by phone at (253) 383-7245 if you have any questions about either of these trainings.
Feel free to forward this message along to anyone else who might be interested- ALL Green Cities staff, stewards, foresters, gardeners, volunteers, crews and ambassadors invited!

Click here to register for the November 4, 2011 Tacoma training now!
Click here to register for the November 18, 2011 Seattle training now!

Restoration continues in the face of vandalism

This sad news comes to us from King5.com, reporting yesterday on vandalism to the forest restoration effort at Garfield Park in Tacoma. Green Tacoma Partnership Habitat Steward Rob Girvin has been working for the past seven years to re-establish conifers and maintain a healthy forest in the ravine next to the park, logging over 500 hours to date of his own time and leading other volunteers who contributed 255 hours last year alone, says Metro Parks Tacoma. Last week he arrived at the park to find many new plantings destroyed. From King5.com:

The young ones were pulled from the ground and tossed into the woods, others were cut off at the bottom and left where they lay. Girvin rescued the ones he could find, took them home and replanted them. He’ll nurse them back to health and replant them.

The severed trees cannot be saved.

Police are investigating and neighbors are on alert, but so far there are few leads and nobody can come up with a possible motive.

Girvin wants the culprits caught but won’t be intimidated. He spent part of Monday like he has hundreds of days in the last seven years, planting a young evergreen in the ravine.

We were very upset to hear this news, but are inspired by Rob’s unwavering dedication to the park. We encourage anyone who can to join in the next Garfield Park work party and help this great project continue. Visit the Green Tacoma Partnership website to see upcoming volunteer opportunities, or sign up for the listserve to have them emailed to you each week.

Metro Parks Tacoma also reported on the event here, including a small correction to the King5 video: conifers to be planted this week were purchased through a grant from Sustainable Tacoma, not by the DaVita Corporation. Employees from DaVita will volunteer at Garfield Park this Thursday to help Rob replant some of the destroyed site in response to the recent vandalism.