Davey Tree Flipbooks

32 | January/February 2016 Davey's technical team's expertise helps all service lines better serve clients' needs, no matter the season or location. That begins with the direction and leadership that has developed within The Davey Institute, based in Kent, Ohio. The Davey Institute's achievements within the past year have established a positive direction toward future successes. Below are some recent updates from The Davey Institute: i-Tree 2016 To coincide with the approaching 10- year anniversary of i-Tree, the suite of tools is receiving an upgrade for 2016. Thousands of communities, nonprofits, consultants, volunteers and students have benefited from i-Tree's reporting capabilities since the initial release of i-Tree Tools in 2006. Several of the tools' features are accessible in certain countries across the globe, but the new i-Tree Eco version 6.0 application is the first to feature a tool that is fully functional in the U.K. The new version focuses on the continuous improvement of usability and flexibility for an audience expanding from its original municipal foresters. The 2016 beta release occurred during Arbor Day Foundation's Partners in Community Forestry Conference last November, while the full release is scheduled to occur this January. Promoting Partnership In late-September, Davey and the U.S. Forest Service made history. Pat Covey, Davey's chief operating officer and president of U.S. opera- tions, and Thomas Tidwell, chief of the USFS, signed a memorandum of understanding that commemorates and strengthens a partnership of coop- erative research and development. "We've had cooperative research agreements with the USFS, and those have been successful for the last 12-plus years," Scott Maco, director of research and development at the Davey Institute, says. "What this does is formalize our partnership with the USFS to create and deliver science that is mutually beneficial to both entities by enhancing the ways we manage our urban natural resources." This formal commitment between Davey and the USFS will help coordi- nate research on forest assessment; expand delivery of cutting-edge tree science; further youth education; and strengthen connections between communities and their trees. The memorandum's purpose was to formally advance Davey's public/private partnership with the goal of enhancing our capability to quantify and under- stand benefits trees provide, as well as developing the science into accessible tools anyone could use. "From the municipal forester and nonprofits, to homeowners and people who manage parks in cities, anyone can use these tools to quantify tree benefits and understand they go beyond the traditional aesthetic value of trees," Maco explains. "But we still have a lot of discovery to do. We only understand a small fraction of the benefits trees provide." Representatives from both organiza- tions celebrated the partnership by planting a 15-foot red maple tree at Barnard Elementary School in Washington, D.C., where the signing took place. ON THE HORIZON Pat Covey, president and chief operating officer, U.S. operations, and U.S. Forest Service Chief Thomas Tidwell sign a memorandum of understanding at Barnard Elementary School in September 2015. CANOPY ABOVE THE

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