Tumwater starts counting its trees

Tumwater has begun work on a new inventory of trees along city streets and on city-owned properties.

Sustainability Coordinator Alyssa Jones Wood told the city’s Tree Board on Monday, October 9, that Delaware-based Davey Resource Group (DRG) would conduct the work from Tuesday, October 10, until December 9.

DRG was hired on August 29 with a contract of $60,000. Two-thirds of the contract was funded by a community forestry assistance grant from the Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR), while the city covered the rest.

All city-owned properties would be counted for the inventory, except for the trees in Tumwater Valley Golf Club. In places with higher tree density, such as the Tumwater Hill parks, Jones said that DRG would deploy a sampling-based methodology to record the number of trees.

The city’s street tree inventory will also be updated, which was last done in 2018. As DNR funds the project, the agency is requiring the city to update the street tree inventory with additional data fields, thus making this year’s inventory more robust than the 2018 update.

Tumwater will be recruiting volunteers to update the 2018 street tree inventory. While the inventory has been regularly updated to account for new trees, the inventory does not currently reflect trees that no longer exist. The volunteer data would be incorporated with DRG’s data before the company completes its report.

The final report is to include an analysis using the forestry analysis tool i-Tree to quantify the benefit of trees in carbon sequestration and stormwater flow. Jones Wood said they plan to compile these data into a geographic information system (GIS) map so the public can view them.

The report will also contain strategies for tree maintenance and look into “tree equity” to provide insight into which areas of the city lack equitable access to the tree canopy.