Displaying items by tag: trees
A fierce battle is being fought in the soil beneath our feet – and the implications for global warming are huge
As humanity continues to burn fossil fuels, the delicate balance of life on Earth is changing. That’s true of trees, many of which are growing faster as a result of increased carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations in our atmosphere.
But not all trees are responding in this way. In particular, eucalypts – Australia’s iconic forest trees – haven’t benefited from the increase in CO₂ as they were expected to.
Why not? Our new research, published today in Nature, shows it comes down to a below-ground battle for phosphorus, a mineral nutrient in soils that is essential for tree growth. The results suggest in some parts of the world, increased CO₂ means tiny bugs in the soil 'hold onto' their phosphorus, making less available for trees.
This is alarming news, because according to current projections, global forest growth is meant to limit damage from global warming.
What our study involved
Our study used data from a Western Sydney University experiment known as Eucalyptus Free Air CO₂ Enrichment, or EucFACE. The experiment is located in a century-old Cumberland plain woodland in Sydney’s Hawkesbury district.
CO₂ is released into the woodland through a computer‐controlled system. Scientists then monitor the effects on trees, soils and the broader ecosystem. Over six years, CO₂ was raised to the levels expected around the year 2050 (according to the current business-as-usual emissions trajectory).
Our previous studies found the woodland trees did not show any extra growth at high CO₂ levels. We suspected the low availability of soil phosphorus was the cause, and set out to test this.
Phosphorus is crucial to the process of photosynthesis that makes trees grow. Phosphorus in soil is provided by bugs known as microbes. These micro-organisms break down dead and decaying matter, and in the process change phosphorus into a form that plants can take up with their roots.
Most Australian soils are naturally low in phosphorus, because they are derived from ancient, nutrient-depleted rocks. The same is true for most soils in tropical and subtropical regions. That makes the phosphorus service provided by microbes even more important.
We sampled phosphorus in all parts of the ecosystem, tracing its journey from the soil to the trees. We found under high-CO₂ conditions the microbes keep more of the phosphorus they produce, to aid their own metabolism. This left less available for trees to take up.
This occurred despite the trees trying to 'bargain' for phosphorus by releasing extra carbon into the soil to feed the microbes.
What’s more, trees are big 'recyclers' of phosphorus – they remove half of the phosphorus from any leaf before it falls. But this was still not enough to support extra tree growth.
EucFACE is designed to predict the effects of rapidly rising atmospheric carbon dioxide on Australia’s unique native forests.
Why this matters
Our study is the first to show how the phosphorus cycle is affected by high CO₂ – and in particular, the role of soil microbes.
The results are important to predicting soil phosphorus availability, and plant productivity, in woodlands and forests as CO₂ levels increase in the atmosphere.
Current climate projections assume increasing CO₂ will lead to more forest growth globally. Forests are a vital carbon 'sink' – that is, they draw down carbon from the atmosphere. So the increased forest growth was projected to go some way to limiting the effects of climate change.
If our results are taken into account, future warming would be higher than current projections. However, it’s important to verify our results in other locations, with other tree species. New experiments are being formed by overseas teams, including in the Amazon rainforest, to test the findings.
Importantly, our results don’t mean that forests are not a crucial sink for carbon. Forests hold a vast quantity of carbon. Avoiding deforestation and planting new forests are both valuable means of maintaining and adding to carbon stores.
Our research demonstrates the importance of considering soils when growing trees. We also hope our research stimulates further efforts to find phosphorus in ecosystems, especially in tropical rainforests where phosphorus is often greatly limited.
Kristine Crous, Senior Lecturer, Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University; Belinda Medlyn, Distinguished Professor, Ecosystem Function and Integration, Western Sydney University, and David S Ellsworth, Professor of Plant Eco-physiology, Western Sydney University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Ku-ring-gai Council tree forum
On 26 March Ku-ring-gai held a forum on the management of trees. It was very well attended with over 150 people at the council chambers or on-line.
The objectives were to inform the public about tree management in Ku-ring-gai, to hear concerns about loss of local trees and ask for suggestion of solutions.
Click here for slides from the presentations and a recording of proceedings and here for more information.
Tree removal hotline
A hotline (9424 0400) has been set up to report illegal tree removal, pruning or damage.
First check council’s map viewer to see if the listing for the address has approval for tree removal. If approval is NOT shown:
- report the illegal removal online (select report unauthorised tree works option (photos cannot be submitted online so email your report and photos); or
- call 9424 0400 (it’s a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week service); or
- email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Large old trees are vital for Australian birds. Their long branches and hollows can’t be replaced by saplings
When we make roads, houses or farmland, we often find large old trees in the way. Our response is often to lop off offending branches or even cut the tree down.
This is a bad idea. The more we learn about large old trees, the more we realise their fundamental importance to birds, mammals, insects, plants and other inhabitants. More than 300 species of Australian birds and mammals need large old trees to live.
Why focus on mature trees? It’s because they have many features that younger trees simply don’t have: cracks, hollows, dead branches, peeling bark and large quantities of nectar and seeds. The limbs and leaves that fall on the ground make excellent homes for many small creatures.
Our new research sheds light on the importance of such grand old trees for birds. We used lidar (scanning using lasers) to map small, medium and large tree crowns in unprecedented detail. On average, we found large old trees had 383 metres of the horizontal or dead branches preferred by birds, while medium trees had very little and young trees none. Some old trees had almost 2 kilometres of branches.
Why are branches so important?
If we think of long, overhanging branches, chances are we may think “threat”. Some large trees can drop limbs without warning, although some arborists have pointed out the threat is overstated. To reduce the risk, councils and land managers may remove the limbs of large old trees.
But if you cut down a 300-year-old river red gum, you can’t simply replace it with a sapling of the same species. It will take centuries for the sapling to take up the same ecological role as its predecessor.
In our research, we mapped more than 100,000 branches from many millions of laser samples and recorded how birds use branches through years of field observations.
When we spot a bird using a branch, we can safely infer the bird has chosen it for a reason, whether resting, socialising, feeding, hunting or nesting.
What our data shows is that not all branches are equal. Birds find it easier to perch on horizontal or slightly inclined branches. Branches with few or no leaves offer clear vantage points for birds to land, hunt or see predators. You may have noticed crows and currawongs choosing dead branches for these reasons.
As trees mature, their branches begin to grow horizontally. Some branches may die due to lightning strikes, fire, wind damage, or attacks by insects or fungi, while the rest of the tree continues living. These long-term patterns of growth, decay and random events are necessary to produce the horizontal and dead branches prized by birds. For a large eucalypt, that process can take up to 200 years.
Mapping the canopy with lasers
Until recently, it’s been hard to map the tree canopy. Traditional methods rely on researchers visually assessing this vital habitat. But we know eye observations don’t do well at capturing parts of trees such as branches.
That’s where lidar comes in. Lidar sends out laser pulses, which bounce back when they hit objects. By recording the time taken for the light to return, we can build very detailed three-dimensional models. It’s a little like echolocation, but using light rather than sound.
This laser-scanning technology has been used in the jungles of Central America to find the ruins of lost Mayan cities. But it can do much more.
In forests, lidar is now increasingly used to estimate how dense the tree cover is, and how variable. This useful data feeds into how we assess a forest’s ability to store carbon, how much timber is present, and the current fire risk. We can even use it to spot animal pathways.
To get the canopy detail we wanted, we used lidar on the ground rather than from the air, and processed the data with algorithms that can recognise and describe about 90% of branches in even the largest trees.
We mapped trees in an area near Canberra. We chose this area because it represents the plight of temperate eucalypt woodlands, which have shrunk by up to 99% since European colonisation.
What should we do?
The very things that make branches good real estate for birds can make them seem dangerous or aesthetically displeasing to us. We tend to cut dead or long, horizontal branches and leave the living or more upright ones. But for birds, this is a disaster as many cannot live without such branches.
Young trees are no substitutes for their older counterparts. Planting saplings or installing nest boxes cannot replicate the ecological value of large, mature trees.
We can live alongside large old trees. To reduce the chance of injury or worse from falling limbs, we could use exclusion zones, add artificial supports for branches, and install devices to catch or redirect falling limbs. We can also look at emergency solutions such as prosthetic hollows on younger trees or even artificial replicas of old trees.
We should preserve these trees wherever we can and aim to keep them intact with their complex crowns and dead branches. We should also make sure there is a pipeline of young and medium trees to make sure there will be old trees in the future. 
Alex Holland, Researcher at Deep Design Lab and PhD Candidate at Melbourne School of Design, The University of Melbourne; Jason Thompson, Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine and Melbourne School of Design, The University of Melbourne; Philip Gibbons, Professor, Australian National University, and Stanislav Roudavski, Founder of Deep Design Lab and Senior Lecturer in Digital Architectural Design, The University of Melbourne
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Book review: What the trees see: A wander through millennia of natural history in Australia
This book is delightfully easy to read but not so easy to review in a limited space as it moves widely from topic to topic despite being embraced by a common theme, being Australia’s incredibly diverse tree flora and the human interaction and exploitation both pre- and post-European occupation.
An early chapter captured and intrigued me right away because we lived in Perth for nine years, and he writes through the eyes of a First Nations woman as she traversed Perth's original landscape with its native trees, now changed largely beyond recognition. But the portion of that chapter that deals with Rottnest Island was an eye opener for us who visited the island regularly and actually had our honeymoon there. The brutal incarceration of Aboriginal prisoners and the gradual destruction and thinning of the native flora meant that what we saw on visiting bore little resemblance to its original state.
One chapter features the Leichhardt Tree Nauclea orientalis, a member of Rubiaceae or the coffee family. The so-named tree in Mackay is probably 200 years old and has survived incredible danger and destructive forces like tropical cyclones, has lost all its neighbouring companion flora, but has survived the destructive fate of so many native trees. So-named because it was encountered and recorded by explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, the author highlights its cosmopolitan distribution in the south-west Pacific and its recognition by Melanesian islanders of the Kanaka slave trade as a reminder of home. But of course it was also part of the largely lost native flora of the Yuwibara First Nations inhabitants of the Mackay region and part of its rich history.
The previous paragraph was a brief 10 pages, illuminating and dense with information, but numerous other chapters follow comparable themes with diverse species and settings. For example, having worked inland and encountered isolated palm groves – oases in the middle of nowhere – I was fascinated to learn of the possibility that these had been brought south by First Nations travellers from closely related tropical palm groves, and had only modestly diversified and evolved to fit their new homes.
He touches a number of times on the huge diversity of eucalypt species, highlighting Dean Nicolle’s Currency Creek ‘tree museum’ in South Australia. He intertwines this with Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus novel, a story in the vein of that country and western song Wolverton Mountain. Coming from Britain which has only 15 or 20 truly native tree species, you can spend a lifetime learning only a small fraction of what Australia has to offer even if you never get beyond the eucalypts.
What author Dave Witty’s professional qualifications are or what he does for a living when he’s not writing books or articles never came clear (he has been awarded a Nature Conservancy nature conservation prize and has published articles in Meanjin and Griffith Review among other journals). But it’s made clear he grew up in Britain and migrated here, and had a long standing relationship that failed after 12 years. The latter arose as an uncomfortable backdrop on several occasions in the book though it did tend to soften and humanise it, and it was good to learn he subsequently met and married a new partner and they have a young daughter.
Dave Witty, Monash University Publishing (2023) 284 pp (reviewed by John Martyn)
Calls for stronger tree protection measures
According to 2020 data Ku-ring-gai currently has an urban forest canopy cover of 45%. The Urban Forest Strategy is to increase this to 49% by 2036. However the level of canopy cover is going the wrong way and there is increasing community concern about tree destruction, both legal and illegal.
In recent months there have been some extreme examples of tree destruction in Middle Cove (over 250 trees) and Longueville (about 300 trees and shrubs). There are many examples of trees being removed in order to ‘improve’ views or increase property value as the size of a home rebuild is increased.
There is some dispute about the level of canopy loss. Council’s measures are that 1.4% of canopy has been lost over the two years to 2022. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald quoted data from a study compiled by consultancy group ArborCarbon for the state government and analysed by the Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue. This claimed that the Ku-ring-gai had lost 8.2% between 2019 and 2022. The discrepancy is so large that the baseline or methodology needs to be examined.
The article stated that, altogether, Greater Sydney’s tree canopy barely changed; trees covered 21% per cent of the city in 2019 and, in 2022, cover was 21.7%. That’s a long way off from the government’s target of 40% coverage by 2036. That target will totally unachievable if the housing proposals go ahead as announced (see previous article). A large proportion of the increase needs to occur on private land. Only so many trees can be planted along streets and in parks.
Responses by local councils
Several local councils presented motions to the local government conference in November 2023 calling for increases in penalties for tree vandalism and illegal removal. The motion passed called on Local Government NSW to:
- Urgently undertake a review of the legislative regime for tree protection and seek increased penalties and deterrents, including significantly increased fines and community service for the destruction and vandalism of trees in NSW. The review is to include the destruction and vandalism of vegetation in environmentally sensitive areas such as riparian zones, areas of high biodiversity value and foreshore protection areas. The review should identify opportunities to better coordinate tree protection across NSW, along with improved education and awareness around the importance of tree protection to build stronger community support.
- Advocate for effective reform to improve collaboration and coordination in education and enforcement to combat tree vandalism in NSW.
Upper house petition – please sign
The Legislative Assembly of the NSW parliament has put up a petition calling on the government to significantly increase penalties for urban forest tree vandalism. It also calls for the recognition of trees as 'natural assets' in the Integrated Planning and Reporting framework of the Local Government Act.
Click here to sign the petition.
The preamble to the petition explains that councils lack resources for thorough criminal investigations, hindering effective prosecution. Despite the illegality of tree vandalism under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act, only 19 cases were prosecuted from 2018 to 2022.
The petition also asks the Legislative Assembly to call on the government to amend the NSW Local Government Act to include trees in councils' asset registers as 'natural assets', allocate a budget for a collaboration of councils to undertake pilot projects to integrate natural capital/asset reporting in balance sheets and develop natural asset data capture and management standards. Recognising trees as 'natural assets' helps us appreciate their true value including their role in combating climate change and preserving biodiversity.
What’s Ku-ring-gai doing?
1. Strengthened tree regulations
Council is now enforcing strengthened tree regulations.
Residents who breach the conditions of their DA or Complying Development Certificate through illegal tree removal, will be required to replace them with a like tree in addition to fines. Residents undertaking works on their land should expect to be monitored and conditions enforced in accordance with their development approval.
2. Illegal Tree Removal Community Forum
Tuesday 26 March, 6 to 8pm
Ku-ring-gai Council Chambers,
818 Pacific Highway, Gordon
This text comes from council’s website.
Council invites all community members and groups to a public forum addressing the critical issue of illegal tree removal in our neighbourhoods. This growing problem threatens our tree canopy - an invaluable community asset we must protect.
We will discuss the challenges faced in curbing the threat, as well as potential solutions. Most importantly, we seek to hear from you - the community - regarding your insights into the problems and opportunities before us. What actions can we take together to protect our trees and urban forest?
The session will concentrate on three crucial aspects:
- the primary obstacles in sustaining and enhancing our tree canopy
- compliance and regulation – measures that can be taken to prevent or remedy tree removal
- education – discouraging people from wanting to remove trees
By registering now, you can share your views in advance of the forum. This will aid in guiding the forum discussion by addressing questions on the above topics in the registration form.
This is a call to all who care about saving our trees to get involved. Join the forum and make your voice heard in developing community-driven strategies to turn the tide on illegal tree loss in Ku-ring-gai.
3. TreeCare
A group of concerned citizens has been working with some of the councillors and staff on ways to ensure that our iconic trees are cared for. The plan is to set up a TreeCare group that will install protection measures such as and information signs around significant trees on public land. The angophora at the edge of the car park at the St Ives Showground has been suggested as the first site.
4. Tree Watch
A new community action group has been formed called the Voices of Ku-ring-gai with goals of lifting the standard of integrity, environmental protection, transparency, accountability, and community-mindedness of Ku-ring-gai Council.
One of their first initiatives is to set up a scheme called Tree Watch. Community members who opt into Tree Watch can download a poster for their community notice board or place a plaque on their fence or gate. This alerts the neighbourhood to the fact that the person who lives there places a high value on the precious and sensitive ecosystem in the neighbourhood.
The group will share information about tree losses and how to report to council if someone spots tree loppers in action and council’s website shows that the tree removal has not been approved. However, their main objective is to educate the community about the benefits provided by maintaining our tree canopy.
Book review: The Memory of Trees
This book was of great interest having lived in Perth for 9 years and worked and travelled at length in WA for more than 40 years, including in many areas covered in the book, set predominantly in the south-west and south of the state. It's written by freelance ecologist and writer Vicki Cramer, whose research and publications through institutes like Curtin University and the CSIRO span a wide range of WA ecology, from bats and marsupials to Western Australia’s management, exploitation and clearing of eucalypt forests. In 2021 she was awarded a Dahl Fellowship from the charitable organisation Eucalypt Australia. Though set almost entirely in WA, the book mirrors the natural vegetation situation in other states and the threats it faces.
The Memory of Trees is divided into long, quite detailed chapters dealing with topics such as Jarrah forests and their threats, the West Australian Wheatbelt and salinity, the amazing Great Western Woodlands with their vast areas of trees growing in climates so dry that trees really shouldn’t grow at all. And, of extreme importance for us in NSW, the subject of bushfire, of hazard reduction and cultural burns and their history and arguments for and against. Relevant to fire and overshadowing everything covered in the book of course is climate change, the biggest mover of the goalposts that we face.
How many plant species are native to the south-west of WA? Well, the book cites 8379 would you believe (but of course new species are discovered every year so that’s by no means the final figure). Of that number, 1750 are native to Fitzgerald River National Park for example, a big park of nearly 3,000 km2 flanking WA’s south coast, big yes, but that’s very, very rich! (Blue Mountains World Heritage with around 1500 species is three times as big). And then the Stirling Ranges: full of endemic species, some of them isolated to individual peaks. These are examples of the fragile communities surviving as large islands of natural vegetation flanked or surrounded by land cleared for agriculture? What species have been lost through the clearing process? We will never know the full number, plant or animal.
Stirling Ranges and Fitzgerald River are flanked by the WA Wheatbelt. Vast areas of forest and woodland were cleared through waves of settlement, and managed on a broadacre basis with no treed remnants allowed to remain that get in the way of the massive harvesters. Farms have merged over time and families have moved away, much as is happening in Europe. The ancient impoverished wheatbelt soils were boosted, and have to be regularly topped up with superphosphate and trace elements. Natural vegetation over most of the wheatbelt is restricted to corridors and fringes along boundaries and roadways, plus isolated small copses. Mass tree removal, their roots no longer pumping, led to gradual rise in salinity – covered by a chapter in the book that highlights the recovery efforts of landowners and community groups but also political sidestepping, ignorance and neglect. Governments like to bypass salinity, highlighting grain yields, but a brief Google search will tell you that the WA wheatbelt yields a ball park figure of around 2 tonnes of grain per hectare – Ukraine by comparison, in its heyday, achieved roughly double that.
The Jarrah forests, featuring Eucalyptus marginata, were a backbone to WA’s historic economy. The rich, deep red, termite resistant timber is hard to source today except through recycling, but it was used in building and construction, in termite proof railway sleepers and in flooring and furniture, and it was exported globally. But it grows on iron and alumina rich laterite terrain large areas of which have been mined for bauxite. Bauxite, a chemically extreme end member of a soil profile, is typically only a few metres thick and so vast areas have to be stripped and mined to yield a commercial tonnage. Companies however are obligated to stockpile and restore the surface material, and the author describes traverses with colleagues in areas ranging from pristine and even rare old growth forest to sites in various stages of restoration. But one comes away with the impression that nothing can truly replace the lost forests. And then of course there’s climate change pushing winter rainfall southwards, and Phytophthora dieback!
Now for the Great Western Woodlands: these are truly vast but exceptionally vulnerable, made up essentially of eucalypt species some of which recover from fire, like the numerous species of mallee, while others are obligate seeders and are incinerated. If you’ve travelled the wheatbelt and the southern goldfields you’ll be familiar with the copper-red trunks of salmon gums. If you’ve driven east of Norseman you’ll have seen fine examples of Great Western Woodland, and perhaps be stunned to learn that the seemingly healthy trees are growing in less than 300mm mean annual rainfall. The author's field descriptions in areas east of the wheatbelt town of Hyden are both illuminating and saddening: overall the vast woodlands are threatened by climate change, reduced rainfall, human activity and most especially by fire.
Later in the book the author veers towards positive aspects: the Gondwana Link and the Nowanup Cultural Community. Gondwana link, which involves Bush Heritage among other groups, acquires land to revegetate to eventually form a chain of natural vegetation from the coastal forests of the south-west 1000km to the east to join up with the Great Western Woodland. Nowanup on the other hand was established to rally behind and promote Noongar cultural elements of which include cultural burning, which is perhaps the only way to mitigate and soften the devastating effects of climate change and fire on the woodlands and forests within a realistic time frame.
Viki Cramer, Thames and Hudson, 2023, paperback, 292 pp (reviewed by John Martyn)
Concerned about a tree being chopped down … now you can find out more
Ku-ring-gai Council has a new way for you to check whether a permit has been granted for trees being removed in your neighbourhood. If you go to www.krg.nsw.gov.au/webmap you can look up this information using the address of the property. If you have any concerns that a tree is being illegally removed, please call 9424 0000.
Book review: Finding the mother tree: Uncovering the wisdom and intelligence of the forest
It's difficult to write a simple review of this book because it works at several different levels. But first of all, it's superb. It possibly has had more personal effect than any other I've read in the past few years.
Initially a British Columbia (BC) forest service employee, Suzanne Simard's observations didn’t tally with current forestry practises and this triggered her curiosity that led to her innovative research on forests and their trees
Ultimately its publication led to the coining of the term ‘wood wide web’ as she explored the way trees exchange nutrients and information via extensive fungal threads linking root systems, between mature parent ‘mother trees’ and their saplings but also linking totally unrelated species like birch and pines.
In this she soon came up against the entrenched government ‘free to grow’ policy which invoked the clearing of land of everything that might compete with commercial timber species. However her work, including measuring the movement of carbon and nitrogen isotopes, clearly showed this is not only unnecessary and costly but often strongly deleterious. It strongly supported the conclusion that healthier more productive forests resulted from keeping natural plant and animal communities as intact as possible.
On another level this book is autobiographical, and written by someone who was raised as the child of a forestry family in the Monashee Mountains of BC (between Kamloops and Banff) who grew up close to wild, forested country and absorbed much in the ways of people and animals in her home territory. One can very much read and enjoy this well written book at that level, and feel for all her conflicts, overcoming fear of public speaking, clashes with institutional practise and established scientific beliefs, family tragedies, and her own battle with cancer.
But there's yet another level too: much of the outcome of her research accords with long held beliefs by First Nations people that forests are a living, interactive, whole systems that communicate beneath the soil in mutually supportive ways. Such beliefs submitted for publication of course would not be accepted by any scientific journal, however her meticulous and patient supportive work most definitely has been, many, many times – she's now Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of BC.
And how does all this translate to our local forests? Do blue gums liaise with and feed and support their babies? Angophoras and turpentines often grow side by side, even touching one another, so do they also fungi-talk to each other through their roots? And what is the story now with ‘free to grow’ style clear felling? When we first set up home in Perth in the 1970s, WA's karri forests were managed on a ‘mother tree’ style basis (though I don’t remember if they used that term) leaving the biggest, healthiest trees intact to propagate for the future.
Author: Suzanne Simard
Allen Lane (Penguin) paperback, 348pp
Reviewed by John Martyn
Ku-ring-gai – Urban Forest Strategy
Trees play an important role in defining the character of Ku-ring-gai. Council has been going through a process to develop a new strategy for managing forest over two years. The starting point was an Urban Forest Policy that is a short statement of principles and objectives.
During 2021 feedback was collected from the community and advice sought from expert consultants that have informed a draft Urban Forest Strategy which will define how council manages and improves our urban forest for current and future generations.
Council is now publicly exhibiting the draft document and gathering ideas about how the strategy can be successfully implemented. Have your say now. The closing date is 5 pm on Friday 8 July.
The strategy will cover trees and vegetation in:
- public parks, streets and commercial areas
- private gardens, schools and other developments
- council managed bushland and reserves
The management of the urban forest needs to take into account the whole ecosystem that supports the trees and plants, including the soil and fauna that are essential for the health of the vegetation plus the availability of a water supply.
Ku-ring-gai Council has described the municipality as the ‘green heart’ of Sydney. This creates an attractive environment for residents. Trees also provide many other environmental benefits that are described in the strategy.
The draft Strategy includes ambitious goals to increase the tree canopy coverage. However the urban forest needs to be looked after by all residents. There are pressures that will work against the goals for improving the health and extent of the urban forest such as climate change, development and preferences changing towards very tidy easy-care gardens.
Citizen Science Project - Dead Tree Detective
Western Sydney University and the University of New England have set up a Citizen Science Project called the Dead Tree Detective.
The aim of the project is to collect observations of dead or dying trees around Australia. It sounds a bit grim, but knowing where and when trees have died will help us to work out what the cause is, identify trees that are vulnerable, and take steps to protect them.
This project will allow people Australia-wide to report observations of tree death. In the past, there have been many occurrences of large-scale tree death that were initially identified by concerned members of the public such as farmers, bushwalkers, bird watchers and landholders. Collecting these observations is an important way to monitor the health of trees and ecosystems.
All you need is a smart phone with a camera and GPS. It is also possible to report on paper by asking for a survey form by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
The leader of the project, Prof Belinda Medlyn wants to get better data about how trees respond to drought.
How our native plants cope with these changes will affect (among other things) biodiversity, water supplies, fire risk and carbon storage. Unfortunately, how climate change is likely to affect Australian vegetation is a complex problem, and one we don’t yet have a good handle on.