Davey Resource Group

The City of Mountain View, Calif., updated its inventory of street and park trees. Officials called on the expertise of Davey Resource Group (DRG) to help in the endeavor and provide recommendations for urban forest management.

Three DRG data collectors gathered information along the city's streets and open spaces during 2006. DRG then created a management plan for the parks division, which presented it to city council. The report outlined the inventory's findings and emphasized the importance of replacing trees that had been removed over the years and maintaining ongoing care of all municipal trees.

The DRG team inventoried nearly 27,500 trees and noted more than 4,500 vacancies, or areas trees didn't exist where previously indicated in provided basemaps. Davey's ROWKeeper Work Planning Software and tablet computers were used for data collection. Data consolidation and quality control was facilitated through TreeKeeper™, a web-based software package that allows users to easily manage statistics and query for summary reporting.

For enhanced accuracy and referencing, DRG used high-resolution aerial photos for tree positioning to provide geographic information systems (GIS) coordinates. To keep the database connection intact between existing tree records and work history, the original locations were geocoded to place more than 32,500 records of unmapped tree data on maps. Geocoding is the process of assigning geographic identifiers or coordinates of latitude and longitude. Our data collectors then repositioned site information and updated the data with current conditions, including areas where trees were removed, new ones existed or previous information was inaccurate. The final database included records on 43,444 trees.

The city of Mountain View covers 12 square miles and is located 10 miles north of San Jose and 35 miles south of San Francisco.

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