14
THE DAVEY BULLETIN
|
July/August 2019
NASHVILLE WORK BLOSSOMS FOR RESOURCE GROUP
Davey Resource Group (DRG) entered into a five-year
contract with Nashville Metro Water Services to conduct
an in-depth street tree inventory and identify potential
planting sites in Nashville, Tennessee, which has led to
opportunities with other city entities.
Led by Metro Nashville and the
Cumberland River Compact, there's
a public-private campaign called
"Root Nashville" to plant 500,000
trees across Davidson County by
2050. Their slogan is "Plant a tree,
Grow a city."
"Our street tree inventory is to
identify where there's additional
room for trees along their streets,"
said Aren Flint, senior associate
consultant, DRG.
DRG inventoried 44,790 sites
(trees, stumps, and planting sites)
along streets and of those identified
19,478 were planting sites.
DRG's work on this project has led
to other projects with the Metropolitan Development
and Housing Agency (MDHA) and the Metro Parks and
Recreation Department, which are piggybacking off the
contract with Metro Water.
DRG is working on a tree assessment project with
MDHA in Nashville for properties they maintain and will
be redeveloped. So far, DRG has done assessments for
seven of the 27 properties for this project and inventoried
2,000 trees so far.
"We've created tree health assessment reports for tree
preservation," Flint said. "This is so MDHA has base
information on where the trees
are, so they can appropriately
develop concept designs around
them during the planning and
design phases for their projects."
Flint said they are also in the
midst of various other projects
with the Metro Parks and
Recreation Department. These
projects include a park tree
inventory with a tree health
assessment report for preservation
and an ash tree inventory for
planning for emerald ash borer.
"It's great to see that Nashville
is dedicated to the health and
preservation of their trees," Flint
said. "They've made, in a short
amount of time, large strides in building a foundation for
a proactive city forestry program."
Aren Flint said the work has been a team effort. She credited DRG's
Josh Behounek, urban forestry market manager, Shirley Vaughn,
project developer, and James Rocke, inventory arborist, for their
efforts on these projects.
VISION
A BUDDING RELATIONSHIP
Nashville's parks comprise over
15,114 acres and have roughly 85
miles of greenway. DRG started
with Centennial Park, which is a
well-known downtown Nashville
park, for the Metro Parks and
Recreation park inventory project.
They recently completed the
inventory at Centennial Park and
assessed 2,374 trees. DRG is also
starting a project with Metro Parks
and Recreation to assess and
catalog the parks' hazard ash trees.
