-: Well, hello, everybody.
I'm glad to be here.
I'm gonna talk about
kind of how we started our plan in Minneapolis
and the story of Minneapolis and Saint Paul a little bit,
and sort of how that kind of got shaped,
what the plan is.
If there's time, I'd like to also
talk a little bit about our planting plan
and how we choose what trees we're planting in response,
and so let me just get right into that.
But, first, I need to thank Ralph Sievert.
He was actually quoted.
You've got some great publications here.
I saw he was quoted in here.
He's the director of forestry in Minneapolis.
Snapped a shot of him right as our plan was starting
over in...
I think this was Milwaukee
at the ISA Conference.
We were just kind of having fun there.
But I need to thank him because he helped this presentation.
I see urban forestry, and I love being an urban forester,
as a multi-generational opportunity and obligation,
and one in which each of us has a chance to
improve the urban forest based on
the current state of the science,
and each generation gets the chance
to move this thing forward.
Here's our turn.
This is our big generational chance,
this emerald ash borer challenge problem,
but let's see what we can do with it.
I'm gonna share a little bit of history about
where the forest came from in Minneapolis.
Like many urban forests, we had
over 90% of our forest was made up,
the public trees, were elms,
and if you think about what that might look like on a graph,
that's almost your whole pie.
There is all one genus.
Of course, Dutch elm disease came,
and we were fortunate in Minneapolis
to have a very active sanitation program,
but we still lost
many, many elm trees,
and when they replanted in the late '70s and '80s and on,
they had a planting plan,
and when they did that planting plan,
they planted block by block,
and so they planted diversely.
I think one of the things that people often bring up is,
"Didn't we learn anything from Dutch elm disease?"
And I'm quick to say, yeah, they did,
and they planted a much more diverse forest.
We went from 90% to much less than 90%
of our eggs in one basket,
and this plan,
it's specifically outlined how many trees were gonna go
in every neighborhood, there was a lot of engagement,
and you could look.
And so I took that original plan and I graphed it and said,
what were they expecting with that sort of planning?
And this is the forest that they were sort of planning for,
looking back in '78 and thinking forward.
Ash was 14%, they were okay with that.
Maple, 28%, they were okay with that, and so on.
In 2004, we were fortunate to be one of the first cities
that got to partner with the US Forest Service
on an i-Tree study.
And so we had i-Tree Streets and also i-Tree Eco.
They were called something different back then.
But those studies,
the i-Tree Streets study did a sampling of the
forest population in Minneapolis and found that,
hey, if you make a plan, you can get what you plan for.
So this was just proposed as the plan on the blue,
but the green, this is what the forest actually was,
and so you can see, maple is about the exact same,
linden's nearly the same.
Ash was 17, and it was proposed
to be somewhere around 14, and so on.
I think that's good news, you get what you plan for,
so let's make good plans.
That was just the public trees.
The i-Tree Eco study also looked at a sampling
of public and private.
So we knew from that study that we had about
a million trees in Minneapolis, and of those, 200,000,
both public and private, were ash trees, back in 2004.
So that makes up about 21%
of all the trees across Minneapolis.
We know that, from our inventory,
we're also fortunate to have been...
We've been investing in an inventory,
my predecessors have been,
and we have an active inventory of all of our public trees.
We know that we have 40,000 public ash trees,
and that's what we had, at least,
at the beginning of our plan.
30,000 in the street tree population, and 10,000
in our park population.
So 30 street, 10
on parks.
And, of course, there's citywide.
So here's a map of Minneapolis, and you see
there's ash trees in every neighborhood.
This just shows that there's
more in some neighborhoods than others.
When they went out, neighborhood by neighborhood,
asking people what they wanted planted on their blocks
and across neighborhoods, it came in in different numbers.
The big picture is, this is everywhere
and something we're gonna have to deal with
across the entire city.
One of the early things we did,
like, I think, a lot of cities,
when we got the news coming from
East of us, was, oh jeez, this isn't going away,
we better stop planting ash trees 'cause
there's problems that are on the horizon.
So, of course, we used to plant a lot,
over 300 a year, and that went down to zero
as we sort of learned the news.
And I think one thing,
there's two previous speakers talked about,
how dealing with private trees,
and we've had a long term,
back to the days of Dutch elm disease,
we've had authority to go into private property and condemn
an infested tree for Dutch elm disease.
And one of the early things we did was we changed
those ordinances so that we could also go
onto private property to condemn an infested ash tree.
Interestingly, thinking of when the tree's actually dead,
that's not our department, that goes to public housing,
which is in a different part of
the government organization in Minneapolis,
for them to deal with because
it's not as much of a challenge and problem
to the urban forest, which is
why we look at private trees,
because we don't want the pest,
whether it's a disease or an insect,
to spread to the rest of the urban forest population.
The dead tree problem is more of a public nuisance
in terms of just, it's gonna hurt somebody when it falls,
so it actually is a different department.
But we also have a requirement that
companies that treat trees need to be in our network
and get a proper city license.
To treat trees both on public and private property,
they need to be a licensed tree service company,
and we also changed that ordinance from
just working on elm to also working on ash
in regards to storing and transporting wood.
And in those early days of the plan,
we were looking for any reason
we could think of for removing an ash tree because we knew
we had a lot of liability
in terms of what the ash trees that were out there and what
the challenges we were gonna have,
so this is just a funny example of a tree, that,
uh oh, this one's got a bunch of shoes hanging in it,
we better remove it.
And then, fast forward a little bit,
in 2010, that's our first infestation.
So that's now seven years ago,
and it was in one of our parks.
It was 2009 that it was found
just over the border in Saint Paul,
and so this is kind of right across the border,
and in one of our parks, 78 trees were confirmed infested.
And here's the big media day,
the first trees getting felled,
and the press is out there, and, of course, somebody gets
to stand there with the press and get interviewed,
doesn't Randy look happy to be getting questions?
And when this came, we decided, okay, we're gonna use green.
We had been using orange to mark
diseased elm trees, by putting an orange ring around it,
and we'd have an orange X would be a hazardous tree,
but we decided, let's make this different.
We want people to know that this is related to EAB,
this is an ash tree, and so
we started using green as our tool for marking ash trees.
And so I want to walk you through how this progressed across
Minneapolis since 2010, that's where that first find was
in that neighborhood, and so this is just by neighborhood.
The neighborhood turns on if
there could just be one infested tree in the neighborhood,
we count that neighborhood as being infested.
The next year, it moved a little bit,
it actually crossed a river right there, the Mississippi,
and, in 2012, a little bit more.
A little bit more in '13, it kind of made,
you know, I say it made a jump, but, you know,
really, it was already over there, we just
happened to find it, eventually,
way down to the South and then over to the East.
And this was kind of a turning point,
in '13, because,
oh, you know, it's just over there,
it's over on the East side by Saint Paul.
It's not over here, it's not up there, but then
when we got the find way across
the other side of Minneapolis, it was like, uh oh,
hey, everybody, this is
probably everywhere and we just don't know yet.
In '14, it kind of balloons a little more.
'15, a little bit more progression,
and then '16, there's a big jump
with our known finds, moving from '15 to '16,
and that'll play in one of the ways
how we're managing and how we changed our management
based off of that year.
We also, during those early years,
were really trying to focus on our partnerships
and outreach, and so I think
we're fortunate to have
a great relationship and a really strong
department of ag, and
the Minnesota Department of Ag,
we're always happy to work with them and other researchers
and helpers to try to figure out what's going on.
So we partnered with them, looking at,
does making sink trees work?
How about these purple traps?
Let's get those out in the forest.
In addition, the Minnesota Department of Ag
put on a bunch of trainings.
When we had infested trees and a lot in one area,
we were happy to host outreach efforts in those areas,
and this is actually one of the big
advice points that I got when I asked them
before heading down here, "Hey,
"do you have any advice for folks who are thinking about
"a new find in their area?"
And this is one of the biggest things they recommended, was
field sessions for people to really identify
what an infested tree looks like
and how to field identify,
I think these workshops are
a really big tool to get as many eyes out there as possible
to think about an early detection network.
And so we also worked on branch sampling,
to take a branch from a specific part of the canopy.
We help by providing the truck and the arborists,
but the science was done by the Department of Agriculture,
and they've some studies
that I'm gonna share a little bit about at the end.
There's Jon Osthus from the Department of Ag.
We actually worked on another
project together called Brewing a Better Forest.
He's on that team as well
as a really generous volunteer.
And then they also,
we've got the stingless wasps going out to try to,
the parasitoids, to try to reduce the spread as well,
and so we've always been happy to help with that research
by providing places for those to be released.
Another research that was done.
There was this hope and question,
how far North?
How cold can these beetles handle?
And, well, they can handle Minneapolis, unfortunately,
and quite a bit North of Minneapolis, too.
Negative-30-something is this tipping point.
And then depending on if it gets cold enough,
it might knock them back a little bit, but
we haven't found that there's this line yet drawn.
And we've also done a lot of
work with just getting people aware of,
what does an ash tree look like?
Especially in those early days,
this is an ash tree
and this is how we can identify them.
There was some grants in the early days for us as well.
So looking at ash trees that were kind of not
providing the most benefits in some inopportune spots.
Interestingly, that early plan in '78 that came out,
that has written in it,
I was reading through it, it was like,
we planted these ash trees under that power line back then,
it was like, why did they do that, what were they thinking?
It's like, oh, read that plan, it says,
all the overhead power lines will be gone
and underground by the year 2000.
Well, that didn't happen.
So one of the early spots we went to
try to find ash trees was in some of these spots where
they were becoming a nuisance in one way,
and we wanted to make sure people knew what was going on.
We have door hangers that we put out
so people know what we're up to
and why the trees are marked in their neighborhood.
We also put the word out in a lot of utility bill inserts
so that people would know, hey, remember the ash borer?
This is what it is, this is what you can expect,
and, of course, when the find happens,
Arborjet comes and other tree care companies, too,
to try to tell you, hey, here's how you can preserve trees.
So here's a media event where
the folks in the background, there's a council member
and somebody from our Park Board there to learn
about treating trees.
There's the shot of the press doing an interview
and getting all the information.
And David Sivyer is here from Milwaukee,
you'll get to hear from him tomorrow,
and I think it's interesting to think of,
you know, I'm sort of setting the stage for
how our plan came to be what it is,
and other cities have plans that
have been shaped, and so it's interesting to see
the directions different communities take.
At about that same time,
Milwaukee was announcing,
"Hey, we're gonna treat a bunch of trees."
Pretty much all their trees.
And here's a picture of their mayor out
injecting the first tree,
we're saving our trees,
and the mayor's really proud of that,
and it's been a really successful program in that direction.
Thinking about how our plan came to take shape,
we have a Tree Advisory Commission
that meets regularly, and so we were getting information,
working with them, going out to neighborhood meetings.
I put, in the back, one of our maps
after the plan was released, that's one of the big,
my 10-foot map, the biggest map I've been able to make,
but sort of tells this story of how
our replacement work is going.
We also got information from elected officials.
But those neighborhood meetings were really important to get
the sense of what people were thinking
and what direction we should be going.
And there is also a city council resolution that got passed
that helped sort of shape our plan.
We have a really big
love for pollinators in Minneapolis
and a lot of concern about the use of pesticides
and how they impact our pollinators,
and so that's been a key piece of how our plan
has taken the shape that it has.
This is kind of us,
kind of some common signs you might see in people's yards
in Minneapolis, and Saint Paul, and the Twin Cities,
and if you happen to go to Home Depot
at some time of year, you might see protestors out
with antennae and
advocating for, "Hey, you shouldn't be selling these things
"because they hurt insects that we care about."
That is something that's also showing up
in the news around our community.
And so, about the same time,
here's a photo of
a bunch of people that happen to be politicians,
and there's our mayor standing in front of the bee hives,
and it looks like they're kind of in some back field
behind a school or something.
Turns out this is a rooftop.
This is actually city hall, with these native plants,
and the bees.
They're pretty proud to be having bees up on city hall
in the middle of a very urban downtown.
And then they passed a resolution that says,
that the city discourages residents from...
Or it says...
I'll read it more specifically.
The City of Minneapolis urges residents
to protect the city soil, water, flora, fauna,
and human health during the emerald ash borer infestation
by refraining from applying insecticides
to trees on private property.
And leave one thing to keep in mind
that's interesting is we have a city council,
which we don't directly report to.
We're the Park Board, and so we're in this other
government agency over here, but there's definitely
relation between the two.
So this comes out,
and this gets national recognition across
the tree industry,
which points out that, hey, what the heck?
Minneapolis is surrendering its canopy,
anti-pesticide neo-Luddites.
Instead of thinking about good alternatives,
they're encouraging the residents to not use pesticides.
When this came out, this galvanized
the community in Minneapolis that was advocating
to not use pesticides.
This was like, hey, check it out.
We're getting recognition.
We're becoming a national example.
So, hey, this is awesome.
A further step towards that,
and then a poll came out,
I think this was work done by Arborjet
doing a bunch of robocalls and asking people,
"Hey, do you think
"trees are a valuable part
"of your neighborhood and worth preserving?"
Oh, yeah.
"Do you think that city trees
"should be removed, or do you think that they should be
"saved with an environmentally sound method?"
Oh, yeah, we should save trees.
And the last question was,
"Would you support city officials that would rather
"save trees or get rid of trees?"
Well, I'm gonna support those ones that like trees.
So this came out in a press release,
and it turns out the politicians really hated this.
The elected officials, this pretty much put
the nail in the coffin in terms of, "Okay,
"we are not going to be treating trees in Minneapolis
"in opposition to this,
"and at least with public dollars."
And so the Ash Canopy Replacement Plan is what we have.
We have 40,000 ash trees, and we tried to think, okay,
operationally, what can we
really do, year to year, and how long might we have?
And we determined, okay, let's think about eight years,
because we can handle about 5,000
removal and replacements a year,
is that what we were projecting,
and that's gonna cost, and we got a levy to support that
of 1.2-million dollars in the first year to do that.
And, if thinking about what that looks like
in terms of people's tax dollars, that was
four tenths of a penny
for every tax dollar that is invested
in Minneapolis public services.
So that helped in some of our communication about
how much it was costing people to do this work.
And that got picked up, of course, by the press,
and so the word's getting out.
We're investing in replacing our ash trees.
As our plan was rolling out, another declaration was made
from the city council that
they wanted to increase pollinator forage
and decrease the use of pesticides in that.
Minneapolis is a pollinator-friendly community,
and that was the ordinance, or resolution,
declaring that, and, of course, that also
got a lot of good, a lot of press
following as well.
And so this is a city,
you know, thinking about that plan,
we're thinking about it at the city scale.
You can think about the most efficient way to do it,
and, operationally, how you might want to tackle this thing,
and we know we've got a city challenge ahead of us
because the ash trees are everywhere,
and so we're thinking about that big scale,
that 40,000-tree scale, but we're also thinking
about it at the neighborhood scale.
So you know from our inventory
how many ash trees are in every neighborhood,
and because people live in the forest and are
actively involved in thinking about the forest,
we're also thinking about it down at that street
and block sale and neighborhood scale
and trying to figure out, okay,
these trees are important to people,
how do we want to shape this plan so that it's as
digestible as possible?
And so, in the early years, the first few years of the plan,
you take eight and divide it across,
you have eight years to do something,
So, if you've got, for percentages,
that's about 12-and-a-half, 13% a year.
So, in the first years, we said, okay, every neighborhood,
we're gonna replace trees across every neighborhood,
about 12 to 13% a year
across every neighborhood in the city.
And so, because we wanted to be
having this as a proactive thing across the whole city,
we, in working with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture,
they said, "Hey, wait a minute.
"If you keep going at the rate..."
We were a few years into the plan,
"If you keep going at that steady rate,
"you're gonna have parts of town,
"the infested parts of town,
"with standing dead trees
"if you keep going at that rate.
"It's gonna be hard for you to keep up with your removals
"in terms of how many infested ones are also in the mix."
I guess I should point out,
we've got the plan, which is proactive
replacements ahead of known infestation.
However, if a tree is infested and we see signs
of infestation, we see woodpecker damage,
those trees are getting removed in addition to this plan,
but the goal is to try to get those kind of lined up
at the same time.
So one of the edits we made to
this plan moving forward as we learned was,
okay, we need to replace trees at a faster rate
in areas where we have known infestation.
So that's the areas in red,
those are known infested neighborhoods,
and then the next tier out is the adjacent neighborhoods.
So let's remove those at the next most aggressive raid,
and then the rest of the neighborhoods that we don't have
known infestations and they're also not
adjacent to infested neighborhoods
we'll remove at the least aggressive rate.
Well, coming one step even more forward,
when we've had, in 2016,
a pretty big jump in knowing,
more specifically, where emerald ash borer was,
we now have four levels of replacement going.
We have areas where the infestation has
been there for two years or more,
areas where the infestation has been there
just for one year or less,
and then the adjacent neighborhoods,
and then the few neighborhoods left that
aren't in either of those first three categories.
I do the analysis for this and put out
numbers to say, okay, tree inspectors and arborists,
here's the trees that we need you to mark for removal
in these neighborhoods at these rates,
and these are how many you need to get
from the population and replace.
And so we put these numbers out.
This was a version of
when we had three different categories,
and then here's an example when we had four different
levels of removals happening,
that these reports are going out
and our staff is marking trees accordingly.
And so here's an example of a neighborhood,
just a fictitious neighborhood where we have
trying to let people know where the ash trees are
by highlighting those in orange and the rest of the trees
in green.
An example of this map
in the next series are the ones that are
on a big piece of paper
on the back, a big map that we use
in some of our community meetings about this.
And so here's an example street
where we're replacing ash trees.
We talked about the city scale, the neighborhood scale,
and this is that block scale,
and although it would be most efficient
to start in one corner of the city
and go all the way across and just march across,
we're spreading this out.
So if you happen to live on one of these blocks
lined with ash trees in Minneapolis,
you've gotten to see our crews
when they come to remove the trees,
then we come back in spring and plant trees,
then we come back the next season to remove some more trees,
then we come back the next season to plant some more trees.
You get to know what our operation looks like.
And so here's an example of three.
We still have remnant elms from that original
population, we're really fortunate.
I threw an elm in this example, and then we have,
of the about 24 ash trees on that block
in the street tree population,
we've marked three for removal.
And then we come back, we've planted in those
locations and we come back the next year
and mark three more for removal,
plant in those locations
something different than we planted the year before,
remove three more, plant three more,
remove three more, plant three more.
Now, three's not the magic number, but we're
essentially trying to take just a portion each year,
and as the years go forward, we're getting a diverse mix.
Some of those smaller trees planted in the earliest
of the years are starting to
hopefully take a little bit of shape
and start to fill out some,
and we're getting a diverse mix out in the forest,
hopefully helping us to be more resilient
to future pests as we eventually replace
the ash trees in a given area
and at the block scale.
So thinking about how we're letting people know
what we're up to,
we are marking the trees, like I said, with the green X,
and so we've got one of these,
this is kind of a water-resistant paper
that we're putting on trees,
not on every single tree, but on, say,
like one or two on a given block.
So, people walking
and they can get a little more information.
They see the green X, and if they see the sign, they can
dig in a little closer and go, "Oh, okay.
"The ones with the green X,
"that's part of this replacement plan.
"The one with the green ring,
"oh, that means it's infested, that means there's
"actually beetle presence being displayed somehow."
And then if it has this green ribbon on it,
I put an example of that ribbon in the back also
on top of that map,
what does that ribbon mean?
Well, that just means that it's an ash tree.
We don't want this to shock people.
We've tried to mark some of our biggest...
Tried to mark a number of areas with ash trees
to really increase awareness,
that this is an ash tree, be prepared,
things are changing, emerald ash borer is a thing
if you haven't heard about it yet.
And this is Mary O'Neill.
Who's from North Dakota here?
Anyone?
Oh, okay.
Well, when you go back, and your friends
and family that lives back there,
have them say hi to Mary O'Neill.
She used to work with us.
She's helped us with a lot of outreach, and
she was part-time with us, and she got a full-time position
up at NDSU, working with the state up there.
We're really proud of her, and I thought
I could say, hey, if you're over there,
go say hi to Mary up in North Dakota.
If you happen to be visiting, search out Mary.
Anyhow, we tried to put those ribbons up on
areas that we thought people would be driving a lot
or high concentrations of ash just so people would see them.
We put them up in our park tree population as well
so people would see that.
We also, of course, updated our website,
shared about our preparedness plan,
and we have maps of all of the neighborhoods
on our website as well.
So if you happen to live in the Bancroft neighborhood,
you can go, "Okay, there's 35th street, here is an ash tree,
"but the street I live on, on 36th,
"turns out it isn't." Or vice versa.
We also put on our website
the ability for people to preemptively say, "Hey.
"I hear you got this plan,
"but I wanna get to the front of the line.
"Can you come out and replace the tree
"in front of my house,
"sooner rather than later?"
Oh, yeah, we'd love to.
Working with people who are excited
about the replacement plan is
better than working with people
who are a little more apprehensive,
so we were happy to take these requests
to work on these replacements.
I'm gonna grab a sip of water.
We also wanted to ensure
that we were doing this in a consistent way.
We've got about 10 tree inspectors
as part of our arborist staff, and so
those staff, and also the five district foresters, foremen,
are the ones that are making a lot of the big decisions
about the forest,
and so we wanted to make sure we were
consistently doing the work.
So we had a lot of in-house staff trainings
to make sure that we were doing that,
you're doing consistent work.
I think I was making some sort of point about canopy,
which is why we're all sitting around with, you know...
Another big impact on our plan was the investment
of our organization
in changing the equipment we were using.
These articulated loaders, this one's an Avant,
have saved a lot of bodies
and have really helped make our operation more efficient.
Another piece that has really helped
with the efficiency and saving backs
and the bodies of our staff
has been investing in log loaders.
We got rid of all of our chippers.
We're not dragging brush to chippers anymore.
We've got equipment bringing the brush
to a log loader, it gets put in the log loader
and brought somewhere else to be chipped,
and that has also greatly increased our efficiency
of managing all aspects of our operation,
but especially thinking about
the emerald ash borer challenge and ash trees.
Now, it's not to say we haven't had any
challenges as I describe this.
Here's someone who has invested in treating
the public tree in front of their house,
and they thought they'd also put out their own
information and outreach attached to the tree
to let people know what they thought of
our plan to replace trees, and so they
put their notice on there, sort of saying
how horrible we are and how this is a really bad plan,
and Minneapolis is just,
you know, what are you even thinking?
We've had less of this than the opposition
challenge of saying, "We don't want to see chemicals out
"in our population."
I think that's been a bigger cry in Minneapolis for sure.
But that sort of alludes to,
if people want to treat public trees in Minneapolis,
that's fine, that's great.
The Park Board doesn't pay for it.
However, if people who own homes or property
want to treat the public tree in front of their property,
that's great.
The homeowner doesn't have to jump through any hoops
with us to do that, they don't have to get a permit,
but the tree care companies that treat public trees
have to be a permitted company with us,
and that keeps them on a registration,
we can stay in communication with them,
and we also request that they
need to tell us where they're treating trees
so that we don't come by
and replace it as part of our canopy replacement plan.
And so we're collecting the information
about what they're treating the trees with
and what trees have been treated.
It's also required that they treat it
with something that goes directly into the trunk of the tree
as opposed to a soil drench or trunk drench,
or trunk spray.
And neighborhood organizations have also organized
around this in Minneapolis.
There's a number of neighborhood organizations
that have worked with us,
and we're happy to provide our information
to tree care companies that help them think about,
let's treat these trees versus those trees,
and come up with a combined collaborative effort
to figure out which trees.
So there's some neighborhoods,
they had 400 ash trees in the public street tree population,
and they said, "We're gonna treat 100 trees a year.
"We want to get out past the
"eight-year plan that you're putting together.
"We want to preserve some of these trees more long term."
So they've done that,
and we're happy to work with those,
and those are popping up here and there.
Some people, neighborhood organizations
have treated some populations in a park
in addition to some of the street trees.
One of the things we require in addition to them,
the tree care companies telling us which
public trees they've treated,
is also that they need to put a tag on the tree so that
we have multiple versions of
realizing which trees have been treated and which haven't.
In addition, we have a five-day wait period.
When we mark a tree for removal, we spray it with a big X
or ring, depending on if it's infested or not,
and then we need to wait five days.
If it wasn't marked with a tag,
and if it wasn't in our inventory for some reason,
but if a homeowner says, "Hey, wait a minute.
"I have the
"blah-blah-blah tree care company treat this tree,
"what are you doing?"
It's like, oh, well, they didn't tell us about that,
so I'm glad you did, and now
we'll take it off our removal list.
Our marks are the ones in green, and then
there's a mark that shows up on a tree in blue,
and when we see those marks in blue,
our operations staff,
they know to save the log from those trees,
and those trees get turned into,
some of them, a percentage of them
go to this company called Wood From The Hood, and they
mill those into wood, which is pretty cool.
These were infested ash trees that are now lumber
and get turned into all sorts of products
at this company, Wood From The Hood.
And we get a little bit of money for that.
We get paid for the board feet
that they're able to take out of that wood.
We've also had some internal projects where we've been
fortunate to be able to
salvage some of the ash, and so
here's the miller that was contracted to do some work,
and that wood got turned into a boardwalk.
Now, I don't know if this will be covered tomorrow,
I mean, I know there's talk about wood utilization tomorrow,
thermal modification,
if that's not on the docket tomorrow,
look it up,
to do thermal modification to ash makes it,
and other woods as well,
makes it the equivalent of like green treat,
only you don't have to, you know,
you're not using any of those same
chemicals to do the green treating.
So this is a native garden,
natural area in one of our parks
that's very highly managed and loved by a lot of people.
Having green-treated wood wasn't really an option there,
and getting the ash thermally modified,
it turns into this almost like a walnut in color,
it's beautiful and it smells good, too,
if you like the smell of a little bit of burnt wood,
and it's a really cool thing.
And so here's an event out there where they were
dedicating the boardwalk.
A lot of the remainder of the ash
and other wood debris from Minneapolis
gets turned into biofuel or landscape mulch
at a big site.
And so I also want to share a little bit about
some of the research that we've been fortunate to learn
with our partnership with the Department of Agriculture
and the University of Minnesota,
they've done some really great studies,
and this is some pretty exciting news.
This has just been...
March 2017 is when this report came out.
Targeted removal of ash trees
does reduce the EAB population in an area.
So, thinking about which trees are infested
and which ones aren't, and where you're focusing
your removal work and replacement work
can have an impact on how fast
the EAB population spreads in an area.
It also highlights that targeting woodpecker feeding areas
is one of the key points to be looking at
in that early detection efforts.
Here's the highlights from the study.
They found that, with two thirds of the ash trees
in an area removed over a four-year period,
the beetle population in that area was reduced by half.
That's encouraging about an active management,
and it's encouraging to think.
It also stresses the importance of early
detection and continued detection
of where infested trees are and where they aren't,
and where you focus your efforts.
Another one of the points is that
the highest efficacy was achieved
by targeting trees with woodpecker feeding,
and, essentially, this is a way to buy time
for all the other strategies you might think about.
So this is some of the advice that I got from
our colleagues over at the Minnesota Department of Ag,
and their encouragement is
do visual surveys,
remove the infested trees as quickly as you can
and by looking for that woodpecker damage.
Another thing, I can't cite a study with this one,
but it's a study that is, I guess, will be
coming out relatively soon.
One of the things they're learning is,
if you have a good early detection network,
you can wait to treat
until the infestation is relatively close,
as in within a mile or within a given neighborhood,
and so that could be cost savings,
but that's kind of paramount on
being able to know where the infestation is.
And they encouraged doing field workshops,
workshops like this, where we're bringing the community
together to learn together,
and focusing on how to identify early finds,
and where EAB is
is a good investment for helping get a long term.
I mean, I think it's a little surprising that we have
as many ash trees as we still do
seven years out from that first find,
and, I think, it's been found,
that it's because of the intense
management we've been doing.
We are fortunate.
This is a nationwide mapping system, this
early detection distribution mapping system.
I can zoom in on this map.
The Minnesota Department of Ag puts all their
finds, ones recorded by a network of early detection
people, into this mapping system,
and I can zoom in on an area and find,
very specifically, where the trees are
and find out, okay,
where's the nearest infested ash tree?
Before driving down here, I noticed that
this network isn't being utilized extensively.
It's being used a little bit more out East,
but looking down this way, into Iowa, Nebraska,
Missouri, it doesn't look like this is being used here.
I don't know, maybe there's another tool out there
for keeping track of where the infestation is and isn't,
but this is one of the tools.
I went back to my colleagues
at the Department of Ag and asked,
"Am I looking at the wrong place, or is this?"
They said, "Well, different states, different organizations
"are doing this differently.
"We happen to put all of our data into this system,
"but not all states and areas are."
Something to think about as a tool.
I did want to also introduce someone else.
I introduced Mary before.
This guy, Eric North,
he also worked with the Park Board for a little while.
He was an intern for a summer
and then he went back to school and got his doctorate.
He's helping to start a program
down at University of Nebraska-Lincoln,
an urban forestry program,
Urban & Community Forestry.
He's also one of the
people that helped start a little non-profit
in Minneapolis called Brewing a Better Forest.
We'll miss him, but it'll be nice in one way.
We get all these confusion between the two of us.
One of us will give a talk somewhere
and the other will be there the next day and they say,
"Hey, you know, I got a question about your talk."
"I wasn't here yesterday, who are you talking to?"
Please welcome him to your community.
I think getting your input about your,
you know, the state of the forest
in Nebraska and the surrounding area
I think will be key for him to help figure out
how to help grow a program for students to learn
at the university.
I've got a few more minutes I wanted to share,
and I'm gonna try to get through it really quick,
about our criteria
as we're planting all these replacement trees.
We're removing 5,000 a year, ash trees,
we're also planting 5,000
replacements for those ash trees a year.
In fact, this year, we're planting around 10,000 trees.
We started the third of April with our planting,
and I want to share some of our criteria for that planting.
Canopy is one of the biggest guiding principles with that,
and also diversity.
I think having
diversity is one of the biggest things we can do to ensure
this future forest is as resilient as possible.
We want to ensure that we're planting
the largest tree possible for the
given amount of growing space in an area.
So that's thinking about what
is below ground and what's above ground
and getting the biggest possible, and we want to space them
about three quarters of the size that they're gonna be
at maturity apart
so we eventually get that canopy closure
and maximized canopy in an area.
And we're thinking about this, like I said before,
at the city, at the neighborhood, and at the street,
and at the park level,
and so, thinking about the neighborhood level,
look at those inventories
and see what we have in the population,
and we have a rule that says if anything's represented
over 10% at the genus level in a neighborhood,
it's off your list, don't plant it.
So a lot of times, that's maple, that's linden,
it was ash, and so that's not necessarily a goal,
we're not shooting to get to 10%,
but right now, it's, hey,
that's not a thing you can plant
in a neighborhood if it's over that.
The next rule is getting down to that street level.
So when you're at a block,
someone steps out of their front porch
and looks left to right, what are they gonna see?
What are the trees that are gonna be
impacting their daily life?
We want to make sure there's at least
three to five genera on that block,
and to do that, we're limiting how many species,
how many individual trees per genera are
able to be planted on a block.
We don't want any more than five trees per genus on a block.
So if you've got three pin oak and two bicolor oak,
oak is full, that's five in that genus of oak,
so move to something else.
Pick hackberry or pick birch, et cetera.
But when you do that,
we also want to make sure we don't have any more than
10 trees that are susceptible to Asian longhorn beetle,
or at least the preferred hosts of Asian longhorn beetle,
because unlike emerald ash borer,
the goal with that management is to
come in and do an eradication,
where they figure out where the infestation is,
draw a circle around it, some sort of buffer,
and then remove everything within the preferred host range,
public or private, to make sure they try to get rid of
all of the beetles in that area.
So here's a pop quiz to see if folks are awake.
What do you think are the preferred hosts of
Asian longhorn beetle that would be commonly planted
street trees in Minneapolis, by genus.
Maple.
Not oak.
The common named genuses
are hints up at the top, just first letters.
Birch, yup.
I heard elm.
I heard poplar.
I think that might be the genus.
We don't plant that commonly on the street trees,
so that's not there.
Maple, yup.
We got a P and a B.
Not pine.
That one's plane tree,
and what do you think that last B is?
You said birch already, another common...
Not beech, that's buckeye.
So these five genera, we want to limit
our street tree population on a given block
to have no more than 10 from this list,
and that's birch, maple, plane tree, buckeye, elm.
I noticed pretty much all of those,
almost all of those, on this list that's being shared.
But there's all sorts of other things on this list as well.
So something to be thinking about, about
what we're presenting ourselves to be susceptible for
in the future.
I always think of this as BB-mep
to try to remember.
B-B-M-E-P.
So I got my little tool there,
just something to be thinking about.
And so we put this out on a little,
you know, we've got a lot of people making selections
about the street tree population
and the park tree population in Minneapolis.
I have this for our crews and our staff to reference,
"Okay, what are those ones? Was that B-B-what?"
And lists of which trees to choose from
and what those criteria are
so we can make good decisions.
And so in a given planting season,
we're planting over 100 species and cultivars
from 40 different genera and 20 different families.
And so if we go back to that i-Tree study in 2004
and we fast-forward to now,
well, this is 2016, what the forest was.
So we have less maple than before,
we have less linden than before.
Ash tree was 17% back then,
it was down to 8% in 2016, just last year.
Elm is holding strong, I think it's interesting to know
that half of those elms are remnant giants
from that original population that has made it through
Dutch elm disease so far,
and the other half of the 5% of the forest are
the young, new, disease-resistant.
And look how many pieces of the pie are
in that other genera, and that's where we're investing.
Looking at where we'll be at the end
of planting season this spring,
you see ash shrinks even a little more,
maple shrinks a little bit, linden shrinks a little bit,
oak grows,
and all those little pieces of the pie get a little bigger,
and there's more little pieces in there,
so that's one of our goals.
Where can we end up?
I know there's a John Ball recommendation,
thinking about 5% as a genus.
I thought I'd put that together and see,
well, what would that look like?
If we really were limiting ourselves to 5%,
what would be the trees we'd have in the urban forest?
I think this is an area focus,
you know, we've got these 10%, 5%,
but I think we can really hone that and think,
well, how much of my forest do I want in one thing?
What is it susceptible?
What is its size at maturity?
What are the benefits I get from it?
And I think we can hone this as a goal
and end up with what we choose.
I think one last thing I want to share, I did some,
I thought it'd be interesting
because thinking about cost benefits
is one of the things, I think, we probably
think about a lot when we're trying to make plans
for a challenge to the urban forest.
And so I pulled up,
we had the levy, we also do work from our general fund,
from our budget, and I pulled up the numbers
from 2014, '15, and '16,
and based on the number of trees
that we've removed and also replaced,
I figured out how much it's costing us to do that work
on average across our trees,
so it's not just ash trees, this includes the big
elm trees that are still coming down from Dutch elm disease,
and a mix of our species.
To replace a tree in Minneapolis, the removal,
to remove the stump, and to plant a tree,
it costs us about $725 a tree to do that work
as our service to the citizens of Minneapolis.
I don't know that I left a lot of time for questions,
but I am happy to entertain questions or
however you want to move forward.
Yeah?
The question was how we do early detection in Minneapolis.
We are primarily looking for the woodpecker damage
as our primary method.
Some of the branch sampling work that was done
also found trees, but the primary tool we're looking for
is the looking for woodpecker damage in a tree
to verify if it has it.
Doesn't matter, we're not looking
in a specific side of the tree.
I don't know if there's a specific side of the tree that the
woodpeckers are more likely to find the beetles on
than others.
I guess that's outside of my knowledge.
Yeah?
Right.
He's asking about the cost,
if we were using contractors or in-house crews,
knowing that the cost he was thinking of
with the removals here would be closer to 700,
with 300 being the cost to plant.
These are all in-house crews.
The only thing we contract out is the stump removal,
but, otherwise, our crews are doing the removals,
our crews are doing the planting,
and we're planting about a inch-and-a-half caliper tree,
inch-and-a-half, inch, 1.75, somewhere in that range
of the trees we're planting,
and we're doing both the planting
and the removal work for that.
There's a question in the middle.
The question was about if
keeping our ordinance against storing and transporting
ash and elm
delimit people from doing wood utilization.
We tag, actively, piles of elm firewood because
the biology of the challenge with Dutch elm disease is that
the beetle will
increase its population in dead elm,
and that wood pile can foster a beetle population that then
can spread the fungus to new trees.
With ash trees, we're not actively looking
for the wood piles in the same way,
because the beetle could come out,
if the tree is removed,
the beetle could come out after one year.
The beetle population doesn't grow in dead material,
the beetle population needs a living tree to grow.
It's a state rule that says you can't move any
out of the quarantine area, thank you,
you can't move
wood, that is, any hardwood at all
out of a quarantine area,
but we're more actively focusing on tagging piles
and making homeowners remove any wood
from their yard that is elm,
more than the ash.
Homeowners aren't utilizing the public trees
for any sort of utilization purposes,
but if they were working on something on their own
and they removed a tree on their own,
and they have the wood stacked there,
and they milled it on-site and then were stacking it,
we wouldn't be coming in and saying,
"You need to get this wood out of here."
It's more important that they don't bring
an infested tree somewhere else
than it is that they keep it on-site.
-: Thanks, Phil.