Happy Nice Mall

What have you learned about how climate change is affecting the city’s growing environment?

To adapt to climate change, we have begun to procure more Southern species, which ultimately means we will spend more days in higher temperatures. I also noticed that the planting and harvesting seasons are getting shorter and shorter. I now have limited time to do our work. We need to harvest when the trees are completely dormant in the fall. Then we have to quickly ask our contractors to plant them before the ground freezes. It’s the same in the spring: You must harvest and plant before the trees shed their leaves.

What trees will we see planted this year?

A significant part of the trees will be planted in the areas where the trees are located. heat vulnerability index (a measure of how temperature affects the health of residents) is high. We plan to plant a variety of maples, oaks and elms in Williamsbridge, Woodlawn, Eastchester, Edenwald, Soundview and Morris Park in the Bronx. We will plant large shade trees in Manhattan, West Harlem, East Harlem, and the Lower East Side. In Western Queens, like Hunters Point, Sunnyside, and Long Island City, we’ll go with beeches and Kentucky yellowwoods. We will plant blueberries and junipers on Staten Island and in eastern Queens, including Elmhurst and Laurelton.

Brooklyn is interesting – there’s still a lot of above ground cable, so we need to go with shorter trees like cherry, lilac, and golden rain.

Started working for the Parks Department as a MillionTreesNYC initiative finished in 2015. criticism about large-scale tree planting programs that only focus on the number of trees planted. Did this program teach you anything?

This program was extremely important. Along with all the health benefits that trees provide, this has helped the city streamline the purchasing process. In previous years, various contractors were choosing trees for the city, and there wasn’t much science behind the purchases. Now the city has taken over the procurement process, so we use science and data to figure out which tree will grow where. If you look around, some streets have the same large tree species lined up along the street. That’s okay, until you have a disease that can destroy them all in one go. For example, there was an emerald ash worm. infestation It wiped out nearly 2,000 ash trees in 2017. To prevent this from happening again, we are now planting several different types of trees on the same street.

Now MillionTreeNYC the program is over, how big is the tree planting program of the department? We planted between 6,000 and 10,000 trees in various parks and streets each fiscal year. Our current budget for tree purchase and planting is $62.6 million. I prefer it to be more. Most people love trees.

Most?

You’d think every New Yorker would want a tree, but that’s not the case. I went back to a tree that had been planted the day before to check and it had already been cut down. Sometimes people crush them or pour gasoline or propane on them. I think some people see the sidewalk in front of their house as their property and if they don’t want trees, they will avoid it.

How do you deal with tree enemies?

Now we have a contract in our contract that if such a thing happens, the contractor will change the tree. I estimate that maybe 3 percent of the trees we plant are destroyed each year. They will be neighbors and we have staff members attending community board meetings to inform them about the benefits of owning trees. To avoid any surprises, we put up signs to let people know that a tree is coming.