The Park! The Trail! The Trees!

About 80 people enjoyed socializing, a "stand up dinner" of pizza and beer, and an informative set of presentations at Prospero's Uptown Books.

Chris DeLong and Brett Shoffner took us on a virtual stroll through Roanoke Park with discussions of the recent Tree Inventory, the new Trails and future efforts toward a better Roanoke Park and a better Kansas City. If you didn't make it you missed a good one. (March 26, 2013.)

Roanoke Park Tree Inventory Presentation on Scribd.com

Chris DeLong detailed the results of the Tree Inventory, showed how to play around with the online map: The Roanoke Park Tree Inventory on arcgis.com, giving one example of changing the symbols on the same underlying data to produce an Invasive Trees Heat Map. Chris highlighted the critical importance Native Trees have to our local ecosystem, with inspiration from Doug Tallamy's Bringing Nature Home.) Several attendees were inspired to plant some natives on their own properties and all wholeheartedly supported that direction for Roanoke Park.

Brett Shoffner showed evidence that Roanoke Park was serving as a model for ecological restoration and showed how trailbuilding was working to bring people together and get people out into underutilized parks. The neighbors of Rosedale Park and Kessler Park are following our lead! The sense of pride and protective "ownership" people felt for Roanoke Park was palpable in the room.

Over $2,000 was raised for the park with a big chunk of that coming from several generous park neighbors who offered up a challenge match to the event's attendees. Challenge taken and met! Thanks to these and other donations we can report that the Tree Inventory is completely paid off (woohoo!) and the Roanoke Park Conservancy will be directing funds toward the park in a variety of other ways including planting TREES.

Part of the work of the Roanoke Park Tree Inventory included entering the data into the U.S. Forest Service's i-Tree Streets program. This program generates data on the trees to quantify their value in a wide range of metrics.

Have you ever seen signs on trees in Kansas City that said "This tree pays us back X dollars"? Those figures are generated by i-Tree Streets and represented the value a tree can give us over its lifetime by reducing heating/cooling costs, soaking up stormwater, improving air quality and sequestering carbon. It adds up. Here's a Heartland Tree Alliance page about it: http://bridgingthegap.org/heartland-tree-alliance/treetags/

Roanoke Park's trees pay us back $153,061 every year!
(Even more since not every tree in the park was included in the inventory.)

See below for the full reports from i-Tree Streets using the data from the Roanoke Park Tree Inventory.

The i-Tree Reports:

Roanoke Park i-Tree Annual Benefits Reports (884kb pdf)

The above pdf contains reports on the Annual Benefits of the inventoried trees in the areas of Energy, Stormwater, Air Quality, CO2 reduction/storage, Aesthetic (property values) and a Summary.

Roanoke Park i-Tree Structural Analysis Reports (1070kb pdf)

The above pdf contains reports on the species composition and quality of the inventoried trees. Reports on Population Summary, Complete Population, Species Distribution, Relative Age Distribution, Importance Values, Condition and Relative Performance Index reports are all included. Explanatory notes appear where necessary.

Molly Gosnell and Chris DeLong interviewed by KCTV5's Emily Rittman

The Tree Inventory happening now was detailed in the piece which aired on Monday morning Oct 8th.

Read the story:
http://www.kctv5.com/story/19762783/grassroots-effort-to-improve-roanoke-park (Unfortunately the video is no longer online.)

The inventory will cover a little over half the park and be a representative sample of our "urban forest." (2,000 trees.) We'll see the mix of trees in the park and know what species need to be planted in the future to bring more diversity, beauty, longevity and better wildlife habitat to our woods. See the Tree Inventory Grant Won!! article to learn more and consider donating to our share of the matching grant at the Donate to the Park page. Thanks to the Missouri Department of Conservation for awarding the T.R.I.M. grant to the Roanoke Park Conservancy.

A major grant from the Missouri Department of Conservation has been WON by the Roanoke Park Conservancy! We applied for the T.R.I.M. (Tree Resource Improvement and Maintenance) grant this past June. T.R.I.M. program grants are awarded to municipalities and organizations working on public land to help them with projects benefiting the street trees and urban forests in their jurisdictions. Click this link for more information about the MDC T.R.I.M. grant program.

The Conservancy's grant application was for a Tree Inventory. This will pay for a GIS mapmaker and certified arborist, working as a team, to go through the park and identify and assess every tree over 3" trunk diameter. The GIS map maker is Midwest GeoInfo. Click the link to see some of their work. The arborist is Ivan Katzer.

Now we need YOUR HELP to complete this matching grant, so please visit our Donate to the Park page to help us come up with the funds we need for our portion.

   $ 8,932 – Cost Share Reimbursal from MDC
+ $ 1,300 – Value of Donated Labor 
+ $ 1,678 – Total of Your Generous Contributions (tax deductible for you)
= $11,910 – Total Project Cost