Davey Tree : Urban Forestry Services : Project Profiles : Cities of Charleston, South Carolina, and Charlotte, North Carolina: STRATUM Reference City Data Collections


Cities of Charleston, South Carolina, and Charlotte, North Carolina: STRATUM Reference City Data Collections

Davey Resource Group arborists have recently performed STRATUM Reference City data collection in Charlotte, North Carolina and Charleston, South Carolina.

Piedmont and Coastal Plain Climate Zones
The Piedmont and Coastal Plain regions are two of the 19 national climate zones recognized by the Center for Urban Forest Research. Communities within a climate zone have similar species of trees with similar growth habits and size traits. The Reference City street tree information collected by Davey Resource Group urban foresters helped to regionalize the street tree benefit analysis tool, STRATUM. Each Reference City is the basis for the regionally specific modeling capabilities of STRATUM.

The community trees of Charlotte and Charleston were measured and recorded by Davey Resource Group urban foresters under a cooperative agreement with the Center for Urban Forest Research. The collected data includes:

Tree species, height, trunk diameter, and crown diameter
Location of nearby buildings and surrounding land use
Planting space size
Trunk and leaf condition
Conflicts with wires and sidewalks

Data collected on each tree was used to develop formulas to describe how trees in the region grow, how trees are distributed throughout each city, and the benefits the trees provide, specific to their region. Now incorporated into STRATUM, communities in each of these climate regions have a tool to quantify the environmental services that their street trees provide back to the community.

STRATUM
STRATUM (Street Tree Resource Analysis Tool for Urban Forest Managers) is a street tree benefit analysis tool that uses tree inventory data to quantify the dollar value of annual environmental and aesthetic benefits: energy conservation, air quality improvement, CO2 reduction, stormwater control, and property value increase. STRATUM is a component of i-Tree, a state-of-the-art, peer-reviewed software suite from the USDA Forest Service that provides urban and community forestry analysis and benefits assessment tools.

i-Tree
i-Tree is a suite of free software tools recently released by the U. S. Forest Service that can be used to assess and manage community forests. With these tools, urban forest managers can accurately quantify the benefits of the resource that they manage, understand and balance the costs of managing an urban forest, and become better prepared for severe weather emergencies.