Quick Take
Santa Cruz has approved a $150,000 contract with the Davey Tree Expert Company for a new lidar-based inventory of its public trees, part of a broader push to grow the city's urban forest to 3,000 more trees by 2030.
The trees of Santa Cruz will be spoken for again.
The Santa Cruz City Council last week approved a $150,000 contract with the Davy Tree Expert Company to conduct a new inventory of trees on public land, giving the city an updated look at the health and condition of its urban forest.
It’s the latest piece of a push to expand and better manage what’s known as a tree canopy: Urban forests are up to 3 degrees cooler than non-forested areas, absorb up to 27% of rainfall and bring health benefits including lower heart rate and blood pressure, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Currently, the city’s TreeKeeper database lists 21,403 trees, including 13,917 “urban trees,” according to city arborist Leslie Keedy. The goal is to grow that number. Crews are planting about 300 trees a year in “disadvantaged areas” across a wide swath of the city, stretching from around Long Marine Lab in the west, along Mission Street and into Prospect Heights in the east.
That planting ties back to Santa Cruz’s 2030 Climate Action Plan, which calls for an urban forest master plan and 3,000 new trees by 2030, with priority given to low-income and other front-line neighborhoods. The city helps cover some tree-related costs directly – pruning and other maintenance among them – and its heritage tree grant program offers matching funds of up to $5,000 for approved projects involving at-risk trees and street trees.
“We want tree-lined streets like Walnut Avenue. We want habitat for birds,” Keedy said.
To increase the number of trees being planted, the city is hiring an assistant arborist with money from Measure Q, the 2024 voter-approved $87 parcel tax for environmental issues and fire prevention, after a federal grant to fund the position was pulled last year.
One of the assistant forester’s main orders of business will be to approach property owners and talk to them about trees, and then add trees to different locations such as along Soquel Avenue or River Street, Keedy said.
Public feedback has also widened the list of acceptable street trees. It now includes the iconic London plane tree, the broad-leafed species that shades Walnut Avenue downtown – a tree that can reach 100 feet tall and drop plenty of pollen and leaf clutter, which can be a headache for some homeowners, but one now available on request through the city’s free-tree program, Keedy said. There are 898 London plane trees in Santa Cruz, per TreeKeeper.
The survey of the city’s trees will be narrower in scope than the city’s 2020 block-by-block count. It relies on lidar – light detection and ranging, a technology that builds a virtual map by shooting beams of light downward at the ground to determine basic tree health, canopy formation and any recent tree fellings, according to the city.
The survey’s data will then be compared with the 2020 baseline to judge the health of the urban tree canopy. Areas of healthier trees could mean less planting, and sickly trees could be a sign that a new approach is needed, Keedy said.
Funding through a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection grant in 2019 allowed the city to create the TreeKeeper database managed by the Davy Expert Tree Company. Trees in open public lands with dense outlays of trees such as Moore Creek or Arana Gulch were excluded from that count, but will be focused on this time, Keedy said.
The tree inventory process is not connected to the planning staff’s controversial new overlay zoning district, which aims to rework the heritage tree ordinance for multi-unit developments to make it compatible with state law, city staff said. There will be public outreach on the reworked heritage tree ordinance in the coming months, per staff.
Talking to neighbors about leaf litter and giving grumpy homeowners fresh saplings for 25 years has already given Keedy a pretty good sense of where the gaps are in the city’s urban forest.
“As a staff, I do have a general idea of where trees should go,” Keedy said. “But the inventory will also really help us, with this lidar imagery, assess where trees are declining in health, where we need new trees and empty areas.”
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