Diversity in Urban Forestry

  • Forest researchers say cities need to plant different kinds of trees. Many cities plant only a handful of species. (Photo courtesy of the US Forest Service)

Urban forest researchers say cities
need different kinds of trees. Having
too many of the same kind of trees
encourages pests. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Urban forest researchers say cities
need different kinds of trees. Having
too many of the same kind of trees
encourages pests. Lester Graham reports:

Pests have already wiped out native trees such as chestnuts, elms and now ash.

James Kielbaso is a forester with Michigan State University. He says native trees are great but, one of his students has found some cities are too reliant on them.

“An urban tree population should not consist of any more than ten or fifteen percent of any one species. He’s finding the trees that are most over-used tend to be our native trees.”

In some cases, maples make up 30% of a city’s trees. That means if a disease or a pest hits maples, a city could lose a third of its urban forest.

Kielbaso says people should plant tree species not already in the neighborhood and a few hardy foreign species could help diversify a city forest.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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