Four villages' greenery will benefit from i-Tree program, new plantings

Trees in four villages will grow more valuable with a click of a mouse.

Mannsville is one of four communities that will benefit from a $60,000 grant awarded to the Jefferson County Soil and Water Conservation District to help promote urban and community forest restoration.

The grant, provided by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, will provide $33,000 worth of in-kind services to the villages of Mannsville, Clayton, West Carthage and Black River. The remaining $27,000 will be used to take inventory of existing trees in the community and buy new ones to plant. All of the trees will be monitored using i-Tree, a computer program developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, with help from partners including the National Arbor Day Foundation.

"We'll be focusing on street trees," said Gary D. Eddy, district forester. "We take for granted the little things they do like provide shade in the summer. It's important for people to realize how important trees are to our carbon system and the other benefits we get from trees."

Mannsville Mayor David E. Gardner said the grant will help the village carry out its efforts to replace trees and promote education about them.

"We've been moving at a snail's pace trying to replace the trees that we had to cut down for various reasons over the past 15 years," he said. "We also want to support this program that has educational purposes for our students and the community."

The i-Tree program provides online tools to assess the benefits of community forests. The program also will help communities strengthen their forest management and advocacy efforts by assigning a monetary value to environmental and aesthetic benefits, energy conservation, air quality improvement and property value.

"People don't realize the importance of a tree until a dollar amount is assigned to it," Mr. Eddy said. "This program is an online assessment tool we will be using to evaluate the cost analysis of the benefits of trees for the community in a dollar amount."

Mr. Eddy said inventory is slated to begin this fall and after the information is gathered, the Conservation District will present it to each village.

"We'll need their input so we can move forward without affecting service lines," Mr. Eddy said. "Our plan is to plant anywhere from 20 to 25 trees depending on the community needs. We'd also like to team up with local schools so that students can have a hands-on learning experience. Hopefully, this program will bring attention to the importance of trees to the next generation. Right now we don't have a target age group, but that's something we will be working on soon."