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The value of our public trees
Citation:
PHILLIPS, D. L. The value of our public trees. IN: The City Newsletter, 24(8):5, (2011).
Impact/Purpose:
An assessment of the value and annual benefits of public trees in the Corvallis Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) was recently conducted by Don Phillips (Research Biologist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] research lab in Corvallis), along with Connie Burdick (EPA geographer), Becky Merja (Corvallis City Forester), and Norm Brown (OSU Arborist).
Description:
An assessment of the value and annual benefits of public trees in the Corvallis Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) was recently conducted by Don Phillips (Research Biologist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] research lab in Corvallis), along with Connie Burdick (EPA geographer), Becky Merja (Corvallis City Forester), and Norm Brown (OSU Arborist). They used inventories that the City maintains on 13,000 street trees and that OSU maintains on 4,000 campus trees, and did additional sampling of trees in other publicly owned areas in the UGB (city, county, state, and federal). This information was fed into “i-Tree” models developed by the U.S. Forest Service to estimate the replacement costs of urban trees and the annual environmental benefits they provide. These benefits include reductions in air pollutants, the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, cooling costs for buildings due to shading, and the size of systems needed to deal with stormwater runoff, while increasing the market value of adjacent private real estate. Every year the estimated 440,000 trees in UGB public areas remove about 70 tons of air pollutants, 3000 tons of carbon dioxide, 100 million gallons of stormwater runoff compared to pavement, and save 4 trillion joules of energy in cooling of buildings. In dollar and cents, the models estimated the largest annual economic benefits to be $2.5 million in reduced stormwater processing costs (compared to pavement), $600,000 annual increases in real estate values, and $400,000 in the value of air pollution reduction. Those are benefits realized each year, but the one-time replacement cost of all these trees would be a staggering $445 million! So next time you’re strolling along a tree-lined sidewalk in the city or taking a walk through Avery Park, think about all these benefits that our public tree resources provide.
