In a vast show of support for reforestation to improve water quality and watershed health, the US Forest Service has awarded $1.75 million to fund projects across 5 states which will mitigate Emerald Ash Borer damage and restore urban forest cover among other goals. Forest Service Northeastern Area Service Director, Tony Ferguson agrees that there…
Data collected via regional Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA), by the United States Forest Service from the 1950s through 2007 reveal that in spite of the accumulation of the invasive, non-native pest of hemlock trees, the woolly adelgid, hemlock forests in the eastern U.S. appear to have sustained the impact well. The big picture they…
A recent assessment conducted by the US Forest Service projects that in the next hundred years boreal forests, such as the ones that characterize iconic sites in Minnesota, may give way to a mix of broadleaf species. Given the pace and way that the climate is changes coniferous forests and feet of snow may be…
Baltimore City is in the process of conducting a series of public stakeholder meetings to support development of a Watershed Implementation Plan (WIP) to achieve targets under its MS4 permit related to the Chesapeake Bay TMDL (pollution diet). The Chesapeake Bay Program learned a long time ago that because of stormwater runoff, land cover has…
We are working with the US Forest Service Northern Research Station and the US Forest Products Lab on an initiative that hopes to answer that question positively. The Baltimore Wood Project web site can found here. It describes the various components of the project, some of which we’ve talked about here previously. project COUNT, by…
The US EPA, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and the Chesapeake Bay Trust recently partnered to provide $3.7 million in grants to 34 organizations through the Green Streets, Green Towns, Green Jobs Initiative (G3). The purpose of the G3 grant program is to help add green space and reduce stormwater runoff by using green…
We are pleased to be helping the Northern Kentucky Urban and Community Forestry Council (NKUCFC) with a tree canopy assessment for Boone, Kenton, and Campbell counties. Using National Agricultural Imagery Program remote sensing data combined with LiDAR data, we were able to create a high resolution tree canopy cover data set. By combining these data…
Yesterday we facilitated a meeting hosted by USGS on water quality monitoring in the Baltimore region. USGS is the leader in this activity. They realized that counties, the state, researchers, NGOs and federal agencies are all monitoring water quality at various locations and frequencies for various reasons. This led to the question: are there opportunities…
Today as part of our work with the US Forest Service Northern Research Station, we met with experts from the US Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis program (USFS FIA). The USFS FIA program is the nation’s continuous forest census. It has historically taken the national census of trees on lands classified as forest land.…
Yesterday the Waterfront Partnership and EcoCheck issued the Healthy Harbor Report Card for 2013. While there are some signs of improvement, Baltimore’s streams, the Inner Harbor, and the Tidal Patapsco River all received failing grades. The overall grade for Baltimore’s waterways is an F. Of all sites sampled, two-thirds failed to meet the swimming standard…
