[T]he city of Burlington is planning to plant 1,500 trees and shrubs this season, bringing the total for a four-year program up to nearly 5,000.
The plantings are intended to restore natural areas of the city in a way that protects Lake Champlain through water filtration and erosion control, and provides habitat for birds and pollinators.
Three Burlington areas will receive the new trees: the bike path in the New North End, class two wetlands at Oakledge Park, and McKenzie Park along the Winooski River in the Intervale.
An additional 360 urban trees will be planted along city streets and parks.
This year’s nearly $10,000 project was partially grant-funded, with $6,000 going toward the trees themselves, and another $3,500 funding plant protections — like tree tubes. As far as labor costs go, the planting is being done on a volunteer basis. Last year, an open call for volunteers saw 125 people put in more than 1,000 total hours of work.
But Gwendolyn Causer, a teacher and naturalist with the Audubon Center, one of the project’s partner organizations, said this year, they’re taking a different approach.
“We looked at creating sustainable partnerships with organizations that don’t see themselves represented in conservation movements,” Causer said.
This year, they partnered with a number of diversity-centered organizations in Burlington to get a broader cross-section of the community involved.
Causer said the project fits perfectly with the two things the Audubon Center has been shifting toward lately: focusing more on native plants, and focusing more on Burlington. She said Burlington has the diverse population that they’re trying to make conservation accessible for.
“We refer to it as the ‘adventure gap’ of folks who don’t have opportunity to get out there and be outdoors and connect with nature,” Causer said.
In Burlington, 49% of land is open space, with half of that coming in the form of natural areas like wetlands and forests.
“These natural areas provide an essential complement to our growing and dynamic urban core, and our work to both steward them and increase access to and awareness of them is vital,” Mayor Miro Weinberger said in a statement.
Dan Cahill, the city’s land steward, said the city is always looking to enhance its tree canopy, and that tree restoration is one of the primary ways they do that. He said they’re restoring areas that used to have formal recreational uses, like baseball fields, back to their original states.
Cahill said that if left alone, the land would eventually see tree growth naturally, though these plantings help expedite that process to provide habitat for wildlife and pollinators. But he said they err on the side of over-planting, since restoration projects see a 20%-50% mortality rate.
The city has a tree canopy in the 41%-43% range, but Cahill said it’s hard to say for sure whether that number is increasing or declining, since the technology to measure canopy keeps improving.
“My gut tells me we have a net tree gain,” Cahill said. “But maybe that’s just because I’ve spent the last three and a half weeks intensely planting trees.”
