Resilient Goshen: Urban Forestry Research Offers Lessons for Caring for Trees
By AARON SAWATSKY-KINGSLEY
I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week in Detroit at the International Society of Arboriculture annual conference. The conference moves around the globe — last year in New Zealand and the year before in Singapore — so the chance to sit in on world-class discussions and urban forestry research in our figurative backyard seemed like an opportunity not to miss.
Across two days, I took in 13 different sessions and packed my head full of cutting-edge (and nerdy) tree research and information. These are summaries of a few of my favorite presentations.
Doug Tallamy is a longtime research entomologist and best-selling author of the book “Nature’s Best Hope.” He spoke for an hour about his research on the relationship between insects and cascading food webs, including the food humans eat. Pollinator insects — bees, butterflies, wasps and moths — are essential in these food webs. Without them, especially caterpillars, which turn into butterflies and moths, food webs fall apart and species that rely on them disappear.
So much natural habitat has been developed for agriculture and urban and suburban uses that he argues we now need to find ways to reintroduce natural habitats into our landscapes. Even small pockets of habitat, in the corner of a yard, and planting native trees can provide homes for hundreds and thousands of beneficial insects.
Urban Forestry Research After a Hurricane
Alyssa Vinson spoke about perceptions of trees and tree damage in the wake of Hurricane Milton in 2024. A Category 5 hurricane, Milton settled in over the Tampa Bay region of Florida and caused major flooding, damage estimated at more than $34 billion and 45 fatalities. In the weeks after the storm, Vinson, a University of Florida Extension urban forester, conducted research about tree damage and how people felt about trees in the aftermath. The most striking portions of her research revealed that while people felt more fearful of trees post-hurricane, it was not significantly more, and this fear did not meaningfully change their intent to replant new trees.
Marguerite Holloway is a journalist and author of multiple books. Her latest book, “Take to the Trees,” is a memoir of growing up around trees and her adult rediscovery of trees through arborist climbing with the Women’s Tree Climbing Workshop. In her book, Holloway introduces readers to sisters Bear Levangie and Melissa Levangie Ingersoll, climbing arborists who encourage other women into this profession and are co-founders of WTCW.
The sisters were also part of the presentation and spoke about how they came to this work, the challenges they have faced as women and the reasons women are necessary to holistic tree care. They spoke about the need to allow intuition to play a complementary role alongside science and the ways empathy makes the science and practice of arboriculture accessible to anyone.
What Research Tells Us About Planting Trees
Drew Zwart is a senior research scientist working with Bartlett Tree Research Laboratories, a company that participates in research across North America. He is engaged in a 10-year research project in Oregon, watching the growth of different sizes of trees planted with different soil preparations.
Four years into the experiment, results appear to replicate aspects of prior research and shed light on some new wrinkles. The new wrinkles seem to demonstrate that more robust decompaction of urban soil and the addition of organic matter, or compost, to the soil lead to more successful tree transplanting.
The replicated results reinforce the idea that smaller trees, at the time of planting, catch up to and sometimes surpass trees that were larger at the time of planting. This is important since smaller trees are cheaper to purchase and plant, yet match larger trees in a few years.
The Value of Large Trees
Jaq Payne, director of the National Champion Tree Program, presented on the underappreciated value of large trees in the urban environment. He helps preserve the largest trees in the U.S., measuring, recording and recognizing them not just for their size but also for their productivity.
Large trees provide exponentially more benefits than smaller trees. Shade is among the easiest of these benefits to picture. Capturing stormwater is another important tree capability. A larger tree is a larger sponge. And while small trees are valuable, many small trees do not necessarily equal the value of a large tree.
As Payne put it, “You can’t replace a 35-year-old tree with seven 5-year-old trees, anymore than you can replace a 35-year-old teacher with seven 5-year-old kids.”
It’s inspiring to be part of so much energy, interest and investment in tree biology and urban forestry. The clearest, most consistent message across the conference was that caring for trees is an essential way to care for people.
Aaron Sawatsky-Kingsley serves as Goshen’s director of Environmental Resilience and joined the City as its first urban forester in 2006. Readers can find this column bi-weekly on Saturdays in The Goshen News.