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Park Trees

Park trees include trees in public parks maintained by cities, counties, parks districts, and the like. Park-like sites may also exist in other sites such as open areas of campuses, botanical gardens, and other private or public locations.

On this page we consider trees in landscaped park settings. Trees in natural areas are considered under open space trees. However, these categories may overlap. For instance, landscaped parks may include remnant native trees along creeks, hillsides, or other areas that are left in a natural state. Park trees may also overlap with facility trees in situations where trees are located near structures in parks. Parks may also contain street trees along their edges. These may be managed separately from other park trees.

Because park trees are more freely arranged than trees along streets, inventories can be more difficult to conduct. Tree locations need to be tied to site plans or mapped in a GIS system. You can use sample surveys to gather data if you lack an inventory.

Compared with street or facility trees, park trees have fewer space constraints for both canopies and roots. This can allow the use of a wider range of species and larger trees overall. However, tree care may not receive high priority where turf or sports fields are primary uses. Crews that maintain lawns may not have adequate training to recognize and address tree maintenance issues. Other considerations:

• Trees in or near lawns need to tolerate high amounts of irrigation. Turf can also compete strongly with young trees.
• Soil compaction due to foot and equipment traffic on wet soils may impair root growth and drainage.
• Surface roots in turf may conflict with mowing equipment and may pose tripping hazards.
• Trees can be subject to damage from mowing equipment and park users. This can make it difficult to establish new trees.
• Hazard management may be a primary concern, especially in areas that are heavily used.
• Newly-developed parks often start with even-aged stands of trees. Phased tree replacement and interplanting may be needed to avoid a future replacement of the entire stand.
• Parks may include heritage trees or other old or unique trees with special maintenance needs.

You may want to consider these or other factors in the assessment. Some park sites are unique. For such sites, the assessment and analysis should address site-specific needs. In other cases, parks of similar age may be similar in makeup and management and can be considered as a group. For initial data collection, you may only need to do sample surveys of representative parks in each group.

Example

For the urban forest management plan for Fort Greening Park in New York City an inventory was conducted focusing on the following elements:

• Tree spatial distribution
• Species diversity and composition along with disease and pest problems of some species
• Tree size distribution
• Tree condition
• Formal landscape features
• Growing conditions
• Human damage
• Historic trees

Results, graphs, and analysis are presented in Chapter IV, Inventory Results and Analysis. The inventory and analysis were preliminary steps to generating specific forest management recommendations. These recommendations are based on specific overall management goals that are specified in Chapter V of the report.

Fort Greene Park Urban Forest Management Plan, New York City, 2004

Planning questions

• What maintenance and management issues are common in park sites?
• Which parks need to be treated individually for planning purposes?
• Can we create useful groupings of park sites based on location, year of construction, or other factors?
• What roles do trees play in various park sites?

Work plan

For each category listed below:

• indicate with a check in column 1 those that apply to your situation and will be addressed in the UF management plan
• indicate the methods that will be used to collect the data, who will be responsible for collecting data, and their timeline for supplying the data
• indicate who will the be responsible for summarizing or analyzing the data and their timeline for providing the analysis for the plan

Park Trees
		Data collection			Data analysis
Include		Methods	From whom?	Target date	By whom?	Target date
	Total number of trees
	Number by species
	Age/size by species
	Tree condition by species / site (e.g., turf)
	Maintenance needs by species or size age/class
	Number of empty planting spaces
	Other-specify
	Other-specify

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