If you need to find shade in Dallas, it’s not so easy. The city is home to one of the nation’s largest urban forests. Named the Great Trinity Forest, it’s 6.000 acres. Unfortunately, the city has an overall dearth of trees. At the same time, the urban heat island effect makes Dallas one of the fastest-warming cities in the United States.
Matt Grubisich, the director of operations and urban forestry at the local Texas Trees Foundation, says, “If we continue to add impervious surfaces and remove trees, we could have an urban heat island that covers almost half of the city.” That’s a little frightening, don’t you think?
Volunteers are taking action to keep this from happening.
There was an effort earlier this year to add more trees to the barren Oak Cliff
part of the city. It’s one of Dallas’s most vulnerable neighborhoods. With
shovels and pick axes in hand, they began digging. The ultimate goal is to
plant 1,000 trees. Currently, there are about 500 saplings in the ground as
part of a project called Cool and Connected Oak Cliff.
Did you know that planting trees is a
low-tech solution to battle the heat island? It’s also pretty simple. Of
course, there are more reasons to plant trees in neighborhoods like Oak Cliff.
Combatting high temperatures is just one aspect of this project. Using
sophisticated data and GIS technology, volunteers hope to harness many of the
other benefits of trees like improving public health and taming traffic.
Back in 2015, the Texas Trees Foundation (TTF) laid the groundwork for the project by mapping tree cover throughout Dallas. The TTF used aerial imagery to capture the overall canopy. They, then, physically counted the species of trees in a sample of more than 600 plots. On average, they found that Dallas has a 29 percent canopy coverage with some neighborhoods showing less than 10 percent. Wow!
In 2017, the TTF reported that trees could help reduce temperatures by as much as 15 degrees on hot days. Robert Kent at the Trust for Public Land, which partnered with TTF and the Nature Conservancy on the project, decided that this was enough to go on. He fed that data into a visual mapping program. The group then figured out which neighborhoods were most in need of this assistance and began putting together the Cool and Connected Oak Cliff project.
Of course, this project is just the first of its kind. With data and scientific backing, more trees will be planted in Dallas over the next decade or so. This should help improve Dallas resident’s health, well-being and the temperatures in the city.
For more information on trees and how they impact our lives, stay tuned to our blog. We love bringing you tree news.
