Seeing the forest for the trees: SPEA students produce neighborhood forestry studies
Seven Bloomington neighborhoods got help this spring from Indiana University Bloomington students in learning about and appreciating an important neighborhood amenity -- the trees that line their streets and shade their lots.
Students in the Urban Forestry Management course taught by Burney Fischer, a clinical professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, produced case studies that could help guide neighborhood-level decisions about managing Bloomington's urban forest.
Students in the Urban Forestry Management class helped plant trees in Bloomington.
Sarah Mincey, a Ph.D. student in SPEA who served as teaching assistant for the course, said it exemplified the SPEA motto: Smart policy. Sound science. Stronger communities.
"At the same time our students were learning, they were performing a service to the community," she said.
The 28 students enrolled in the course were divided into teams of four, each of which was matched with a neighborhood near the IU campus. After spending the first part of the semester learning principles of urban forestry, the teams got to know their parts of the city. Some attended neighborhood association meetings; some conducted e-mail surveys, getting residents' input and information on tree-related issues.
All the teams compiled data on the number and species of trees in the neighborhood and, using satellite images from Google Earth, evaluated the extent of tree canopy cover. They produced recommendations for the future, based on neighborhood preferences. Students made use of not only what they learned in the course but skills from other IU classes in interviewing, statistics and GIS basics.
As a resource, they used the 2007 Bloomington Street Tree Report: An Analysis of Demographics and Ecosystem Services, produced by Fischer, Mincey and several students as an outgrowth of a previous urban forest management course. The students tried to consider not only street trees but to account for the extent and variety of trees on private property in the neighborhoods.
Fischer said neighborhood leaders responded readily to the idea, with several replying to e-mails about the project on the same day they were sent. "The enthusiasm of the neighborhoods was really big," he said. "There are already several neighborhoods requesting our assistance during next year's course."
Reports generated by the Urban Forestry Management class could help the city of Bloomington develop plans for urban forests.
Georgia Schaich of the Green Acres neighborhood said her eastside Bloomington neighbors are keenly aware of the importance of trees to the neighborhood. And they were eager to connect with students who were ready to venture off campus to learn.
"One of the issues is that our trees are aging," she said. "And some people have cut down trees. We wanted to make sure we were doing our part to keep the process moving forward by planting new trees."
Mincey, who was a student in Fischer's Urban Forest Management course in 2007, said working with neighborhood associations helped students understand that there's more to urban forest management than knowing which trees grow best in the city.
"The biological data can't stand alone," she said. "I think that's the message we were trying to get across to the students -- with urban forest management, it's not just the hard science; we must consider the social institutions and circumstances as well."
"What's nice is, they're not developing a one-solution-fits-all approach," added Lee Huss, the City of Bloomington urban forester, who also worked with the students. "You want neighborhoods to buy into your program and have a sense of ownership, and this fits the bill for urban forestry."
Neighborhood associations will get copies of the completed case studies this summer, after final editing is completed. Fischer plans to provide summaries of the neighborhood reports to the city's Housing and Neighborhood Development office and to Huss, the city's urban forester.
But the Green Acres neighborhood got something specific from the class even before the semester ended. On April 17, students gathered near the corner of Roosevelt and Fifth streets where, joined by Fischer, Huss and several neighbors, they helped plant serviceberry trees along the street.
"This is a wonderful project that we hope will keep going," said Schaich, who represented the neighborhood association at the tree planting.
