Emerald Ash Borer Presentation-This Wednesday

Part of my absence from the blog would be teaching my winter term class “Trees and the Urban Forest” again this semester. It’s a great class, in a super rushed sort of way all winter term classes probably are.

As you may well be aware, the Emerald Ash Borer is a small exotic insect invading the country, and is poised to enter Vermont in the next couple of years. It has the potential to eliminate all the native Ash trees from the state. Just on the campus grounds itself we have over 200 large Ash trees that will need to be removed at great expense, and replanted. For a quick explaination, see http://www.vtinvasives.org/invaders/emerald-ash-borer .

Two years ago my winter term class took a draft of an emergency preparedness plan for the eventual arrival of the insect from the State Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation and completed it for the Town of Middlebury. This winter term we are now drafting the plan for Middlebury College. This includes surveying all the Ash on campus, coming up with options for treatment or removal, giving replanting options, and running a computer model to calculate the lost benefits from these trees, including stormwater and pollution abatement, carbon sequestration, and energy savings.

We’d be honored if you could join us to present the plan to the College community on Wednesday, January 28th at noon, in The Orchard, room 103 in the Franklin Environmental Center. I understand it’s short notice (sorry!) and winter term is crazy in even a relaxing year. Please feel free to email me with questions, and if you know of someone else that would be interested, please let them know!

Middlebury Becomes a Tree Campus

I’m very (very) pleased write that Middlebury College has been named a Tree Campus for 2010, culminating work started in January of last year by the students in my Trees and the Urban Forest Winter Term class. Special thanks goes to two students in particular, Chelsea Ward-Waller and Hilary Platt, for being the driving force behind the application process, and for being strong advocates of our urban forest on campus.

I’ll quote from the letter we received-

The Tree Campus USA program is an initiative that sprang from a partnership between the Arbor Day Foundation and Toyota MotorNorth America, Inc., to foster the development of the next generation of Tree Stewards. The program is designed to award national recognition to college campuses and the leaders of their surrounding communities for promoting healthy urban forest management and engaging the3 campus community in environmental stewardship.

As you already know, trees are a vital component of the infrastructure in campus landscaping, providing environmental and economical benefits. Trees in urban areas, and especially on campuses, reduce the heat island effect caused by pavement and buildings. Leaves filter the air we breather by removing dust and other particles. Properly placed trees create a welcoming environment that makes students, administration,and alumni want to be a part of the campus.

Last year there were 74 Tree Campuses across the country,and this year there are 114. Middlebury is the only campus in Vermont that is a Tree Campus, and one of only two in New England. The older program, Tree City USA, has over 3400 communities, with 8 in Vermont, including Burlington and Rutland. We all can take great pride in our trees and campus landscape, and I enjoy being part of a team that places as much value as we do on our campus environment.

The standards to become a Tree Campus are designed to create a sustainable plan to care for and manage campus trees, and to provide opportunities to engage and educate college students and community members in tree planting, benefits of trees, and in Best Management practices. To be eligible for Tree Campus USA recognition, schools must meet five core standards of tree care and community engagement: Establish a campus tree advisory committee, evidence of a campus tree-care plan, verification of dedicated annual expenditures on the campus tree-care plan, involvement in an Arbor Day observance, and a service-learning project aimed at engaging the student body in sustainable efforts. Collaboration is encouraged-the program is a platform for students, faculty, staff, and community members to team up and learn from one another about the benefits of trees on college campuses. Ensures true sustainability of the urban forest by joining forces with the broader forest community.

Our service learning project was a high point in the entire process. Another group of students in the Winter Term tree class worked on a complete Street Tree plan for an area in Middlebury known as Buttolph Acres. This included an inventory of existing trees, recommended locations and varieties, as well as tree planting specifications. The students also used a computer model known as iTree to estimate what the potential carbon sequestration, storm water abatement, and pollution control the tree planting would yield in 25 and 50 years. The work they put into this is amazing-I highly recommend downloading it ( Buttolph Acres Proposal ) and reading it.

And yes, we’re planning a heck of an Arbor Day (May 6). Stay tuned!

Happy Arbor Day!

A final reminder to join us, 3:00, on the McCullough Plaza for a tree walk around campus, followed by a tree planting by Bicentennial Hall. Come learn about the trees around us, and make your mark on Middlebury by planting something you’ll watch grow for the rest of your life.
As part of her class project in the Trees and The Urban Forest winter term class, Laura Budd took the tree inventory of the Middlebury College Campus and ran it through iTree, modeling software that quantifies the benefits of a urban tree population. Today seems like an appropriate time to remind everyone of what our campus trees do for our environment.
2.75 million gallons of Stormwater intercepted

270,000 lbs of carbon sequestered yearly, 616,000 lbs sequestered and avoided, and 5.36 million lbs stored in total

3156 lbs of air pollutants captured or avoided, including 807 lbs of ozone, 1580 lbs NO2, 778 lbs SO2, and 503 lbs of PM10.

More Art in the Landscape

While I’ve already proven my failure as an Art Critic, I still enjoy the end of the term, when outside art projects start appearing overnight, and I feel like I should share them with you. Very rarely do we in the department ever find anything out about the works-we don’t even know the class or professor. Many have to do with trees, so sometimes I worry. Like last year, when I took a close look at a yellowwood tree on the south side of Coffrin, and found tiny bits of yarn left on many, many twigs. The yarn must have been nylon, for while it appeared old and weathered, it was still quite strong, and not starting to rot and fall off. All of this had to be removed, before the yarn started choking the branches and killing them. The term isn’t over, but here our some that have appeared.

This was a fun one, on a Japanese Maple tree outside of Johnson. I was over by Battell, and it drew my eye from that far away. Those are little bits of paper scotch taped to the branches, right around when the Magnolias were blooming. It was gone by the next day, with only a couple of errant tape pieces left to remove.

This piece caught my eye. I meant to forward this picture to Matt Biette, asking him for a reward on dishware retrieval. Notice the bottle at the top of the hill, like the plates are cascading down around the spectacular Red Oak tree.

My favorite, though, goes to one I actually know more about, thanks to Carrie Macfarlane of Armstrong Library fame (thanks Carrie!). Jue Yang, ‘11.5, made this spectacular sculpture for the Spring Symposium, based on her work in the “Art on the Land” Winter term class with Eric Nelson. You, dear reader, must see this in person to appreciate it-the size and layout preclude great photography, at least by me (any volunteers? I’ll post them) Walk on the Bicentennial Hall side of Freeman International Center, past the patio, and down around the back. The beginning (?) of the sculpture starts low, almost like a fallen tangle of branches, and builds as it wends through brush and trees. All the wood was local to the immediate area, so the piece grows almost organically like the landscape around it, working in a tree, and playing off the topography. Meet me at our Arbor Day celebration on Friday the 7th and I’ll point you in the right direction. (click on the picture to download a larger-one is now my desktop background on my laptop)

Overall View
Close Up
Close Up

Details
Details

Winter Term

Hello all, I’m back now. Thanks for your emails wondering if I am still around. I am. I had the pleasure of teaching a Winter Term course, BIOL 1003- Trees and the Urban Forest. What fun it was to join in the Middlebury experience from the faculty side, as opposed to being the staff guy with the dirt on his knees.

I love how random Middlebury is, how it appears out of nowhere, popping up in your life when you least expect a dose of academia. A good example of this was Nancy and I driving home from one of those inevitable but still unpleasant Taft Corners runs (Plato’s Closet and Once Upon a Child, have pity for me with 3 girls), and tuning the radio into WRMC, Middlebury’s own radio station. Sunday night, 4 Pm, and the show was The Jet Stream. Now granted, I’m a bit of a weather obsessive, but I was blown away by the quality of this show. Two guys, doing nothing but talking about the weather for the upcoming week. (who are you two? If you see me up in a tree on campus pruning stop and introduce yourself) Easily the best forecast discussion I’ve heard in a long time, with talk of computer models, trends, and facts for the obsessive in all of us. As high quality as the Eye on the Sky guys at noon  on Vermont Public Radio. My only comparable experience while driving was listening to a book on tape, A Brief History of the Universe by Stephen Hawking. I remember listening to that one and having to pull off the side of the road to sit and think for a little bit.

Another Middlebury random experience was just this morning, while reading Slate. The article was on Lost, and it mentioned another article by Jason Mittell. I thought I’d recognized the name, and sure enough, he’s in the Middlebury faculty. It’s not a small world, it’s just random.

Winter Term was a blast. I was warned by someone-it comes at you fast. Did it ever. 4 days a week of classes for four weeks didn’t even leave enough time to sneeze. The class did a couple of large service projects I’ll be writing about in the upcoming weeks. One was the start of applying to the Arbor Day Foundation to become a Tree Campus. Another was developing a street tree plan for an area in Middlebury known as Buttolph Acres. Yet another was taking the Middlebury Campus Tree Map and running the information through a computer model called iTree to determine stormwater abatement, pollution control, and carbon sequestration, among other items. Good blog fodder until the landscape starts greening up to be sure.

What an honor to work with Middlebury students. It was an experience I won’t forget for a long time, and one should the stars align correctly again I’d love to repeat. 23 students, all smarter than I am, teaching me as much as I was teaching them. Hopefully I’ll get a little random as well.