EVENTreport

By Brandie Bland

On Wednesday, Sept. 7, Montgomery Parks and Casey Trees hosted their 11th annual Urban Tree Summit conference. This year, the Urban Tree Summit was presented in a hybrid format: three in-person field sessions and virtual sessions hosted on Whova. The in-person field sessions took place at Pope Farm Nursery in Gaithersburg, MD; Birchwood City Recreation Area in Oxon Hill, MD; and Spring Valley Park in Washington, DC. The summit started out with a brief welcome, followed by presentations throughout the day and ended with information on the field sessions the following day. Colter Burkes, the event organizer and senior urban forester for Montgomery Parks, said, “This is the second year we had a hybrid format and in-person sessions. This format has worked well to reach a wide audience of people who want different things from a conference.” This year’s conference hosted a diverse group of arboriculture presenters who, according to Caseytrees.org, focused on “the health and welfare of trees in our increasingly developed landscapes.” The conference was a great opportunity for local citizens to meet with and learn from arborists, social scientists, environmental developers, and green energy-focused businature and the internet is what inspired Galle to find more than 100 ways to bring nature online. Galle condensed this broad web of ideas into a single phrase: “Internet of Nature” or IoN for short. The Internet of Nature uses ecology and technology together in a restorative way that respects nature, rather than exploiting or taking from nature. The Internet of Nature uses different forms of technology, like satellite imaging, remote sensing, and virtual reality. “What if trees could tell humans what they need,” Galle asked. Soil Mania, a company in the Netherlands that Galle works with, does exactly that. Soil Mania deploys the Internet of Nature to allow trees to tweet and tell humans what they need. For the last five years, Galle has worked on developing wireless underground sensors that, as she says, “plug into the Earth’s internet,” to understand what a tree needs and where. The sensors measure things like soil moisture, pH, salinity, temperature, and oxygen levels. The Internet of Nature takes the information collected by the sensors and turns it into data for city tree care managers, who then translate it into rules. The rules work as a baseline for criteria for a tree’s needs, so that when a particular tree meets those criteria, like a certain oxygen level, the data is translated into a shareable tweet that humans can understand. A birch tree named Bowie in Liver-

nesses that are leading the way in technologies focused on ways to keep the urban environment and trees healthy and thriving. Montgomery Parks prides itself on creating a consistent and well-rounded summit that “offers attendees a high quality learning experience and ways to connect with each other,” Burkes said. There were about 300 attendees at this year’s conference. Montgomery Parks’ work to educate the community about tree health extends beyond their annual summit: The organization hosts events throughout the year, including an Arbor Day celebration around April of every year. “We educate people on the importance of trees in communities…we also have kid tree-climbing events at various locations across Montgomery County, which allow kids to climb high in trees using ropes and saddles to experience what it is like to climb trees like our arborists do,” Burkes said.

Why Nature and the Internet Go Hand-in-Hand

Dr. Nadina Galle, an ecological engineer based in the Netherlands, explored ways to connect nature with the internet—a concept that is foreign to many. “Nearly everything has undergone a digital transformation except nature. Our relationship with nature has remained offline,” Galle said. The idea of bridging the gap between

pool, England, is already participating in Galle and Soil Mania’s project. Follow the tree on Twitter @bowiethebirch to see what Bowie has been telling humans it needs lately. Soil Mania and the City of Liverpool’s research shows that when technology is intertwined with nature in thoughtful ways, it can create a big impact. Galle also highlighted the need for humans to prioritize spending more time in nature and enhance the connection between human health and exposure to nature. Nature Quant, a U.S. company based in Oregon, analyzes satellite imagery, Google Street imagery, databases for GIS and land classification, noise and air pollution, and infra-tree canopy datasets to create a score of how good the nature in an area is at combating health and heart disease, depression, and anxiety. “These nature-deficient areas tend to coincide with areas of great socioeconomic need,” Galle said. Currently, the White House is considering using Nature Quant’s technology to target federal investments in naturedeficient areas. The Arbor Day Foundation uses Nature Quant’s technology to help the foundation reach its goal to plant 500 million trees in the next five years. In January of this year, Galle worked with Nature Quant to release an app called “Nature Dose.” Nature Dose is a personalized nature tracker that can monitor how much time a person spends indoors and how much nature a person is exposed to on a given day. “Nobody talked about 10,000 steps a day before Fitbit came along, and my hope is that in the same way the Fitbit has revolutionized how many steps people are getting every day, Nature Dose will do the same with your exposure to nature,” Galle said. Nature Dose is available to download at the Apple App Store and from Google Play.

Tiny Forest: Reconnecting City Dwellers to Nature

Daan Bleichrodt, the chief tree planting officer at IVN Nature Education, talked about his personal tiny forest journey and his love of connecting children to nature. Bleichrodt has led the tiny forest movement since 2014. He grew up in a small village in the Netherlands, where one of his fondest memories in nature was trying to save his favorite tree from being cut down. “We wrote to the municipality and collected autographs to try and stop the tree from being cut down, but despite our best efforts, the tree was still cut down,” Bleichrodt said. Bleichrodt was first inspired to try to create his own tiny forest using the Miyawaki method after watching Shubhendu Sharma’s TED Talk about how to create a tiny forest. The Miyawaki method is named after Akira Miyawaki, a Japanese botanist who sought to bring “chinju no mori” to the world. Chinju no mori are forests built for protection around sacred Shinto shrines, Bleichrodt said. Bleichrodt defines a tiny forest as “a native dense forest the size of a tennis court.” In 2015, Bleichrodt and Sharma built the first tiny forest in Zaandam, the Netherlands. Preparation for the tiny forest required extensive soil preparation and for three trees to be planted per square meter. The Netherlands’ first tiny forest faced a lot of speculation because it was the first of its kind in Europe. “The first year after planting it, scientists discovered 172 different species of animals,” Bleichrodt said. The need for more tiny forests is prevalent now more than ever due to global warming: Research has shown these forests are 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than surrounding areas and help cool cities. After speaking to a child in a local community who had never been to a forest and had to travel 10 minutes by bike to the nearest one, Bleichrodt was inspired to find a way to reconnect urban children with nature. “Three out of four people (in my country) live in an urban context and they don’t go to nature that often,” Bleichrodt said. Bleichrodt was inspired to create a program called Tiny Forest Rangers, which helps kids become forest rangers and learn what forest rangers do. Along with the Tiny Forest Rangers program, each tiny forest is also equipped with outdoor classrooms where teachers from the community can hold outdoor class sessions that allow the children to be fully immersed in nature. “By immersing children in nature at a young age, they grow up to be healthy, happy, and more creative adults,” Bleichrodt said. A Cornell University study found that children who can see nature and green spaces from their home’s windows are better able to cope with negative life experiences compared to children who cannot. “Growing up in nature made me want to protect nature,” Bleichrodt said. Over the last seven years, 260 tiny forests have been planted throughout the Netherlands and 17,285 Tiny Forest Rangers have joined the program. Bleichrodt and IVN plan to plant 100 more tiny forests by 2026 and 100 tiny forests with outdoor working spaces. They aim to have a tiny forest in every European Union (EU) member state before 2026. Visit IVN’s website (ivn.nl) to learn more about tiny forests or find out how to start your own tiny forest.

Boosting Tree Immunity for Disease Control

Dr. Glynn Percival, senior arboricultural research manager at the Bartlett Tree Research and Diagnostic Laboratory at the University of Reading, U.K., discussed tree management and disease control. Over the last five years, disease, climate change, and invasive species have threatened native tree populations—with some facing extinction soon. “Trees are naturally susceptible to tree diseases, but the frequency and severity of the tree disease is due to climate change,” Dr. Percival said. Due to the constant and rapid threat of disease, disease management is critical so it doesn’t spread to other tree genera. In the realm of disease control for trees, there are mainly two options: management or destruction and removal, with the latter being a last resort. Tree disease management relies on either organic material or synthetic materials like fungicides and insecticides. Although synthetic materials like fungicides can be successful at saving diseased trees, they must be applied before a certain stage and used