The New York State Arborists Annual Conference & Expo on February 4-5 offered some compelling presentations as well as networking opportunities and the chance to greet colleagues.
Mark Duntemann, Senior Consultant for Natural Path Forestry, gave the keynote address. He opened his talk, “Lessons Learned From a Tree-Related Fatality Case,” by saying, “There’s a lot of anxiety about tree hazards. We want to make the right choices.”
An international consultant on topics of tree risk and urban forestry policy development, Duntemann serves as an expert witness in numerous tree-related litigation cases. He discussed the vital importance of “system level management.” Managing risk, he said, “concerns understanding uncertainty. Often one tree is used as a surrogate to represent your whole program, and these are almost invariably false representations.”
Integrated risk management, Duntemann suggested, “must be understood and supported on all levels of operations, management and administration. It’s best accomplished by everybody on staff, as well as stakeholders.” A plan must be customized so that it “is unique to each organization, not a cookie cutter approach.” The ideal program is inclusive, engaging stakeholders, clients and advisory boards. It will be dynamic, adaptable as new information becomes available. Uncertainty, Duntemann pointed out, is better understood with current and reliable data. Human and cultural factors, including individual tolerances and attitudes, must be taken into account, and he stressed the importance of continual improvement, or always striving to better understand uncertainty.
Risk, most simply, “is the likelihood of an individual event happening.” It’s difficult sometimes to predict it in order to establish an appropriate response. He shared the interesting example of Singapore, which has 1.3 million publicly owned trees that were inspected on a 1-1 ½ year inspection cycle until three years ago, when a harmful event took place. The President changed the inspection cycle to six months. “Was that appropriate? “ Duntemann asked. “No. It won’t reduce risk.” He said he has advised “on eighty tree fatality cases, and most of them involved trees that would have been rated low risk.”
“The ideal program is inclusive, engaging stakeholders, clients and advisory boards.”
A panel of professional climbers gave an update on “Climber Development and Gear.” Ducep Moreno of New York City Parks and contract climbers Matt Childs and Logan Stine spoke about the development of equipment over the years. Changes in harness design have increased safety since Ed Hobbs’ invention of the Bry-Dan in 1969. That product and the Sierra Tree Saddle were both “too early for their time,” said Moreno. In 2008, manufacturers began to make design improvements. The Rope Wrench, said Stine, “has changed everybody’s abilities.” New hitches, Moreno told the packed room, “are all different, but based on the same principle.” The three experts agreed about the importance of reading the product manuals for saddles, snips, carabiners and ascenders. “It’s the most essential thing a climber can do,” said Childs.
“Diagnostics for Dummies” proved to be a hit for a crowd eager to learn about tools and approaches for learning what is going on with a tree. “Not taking things for granted is really important, said Mark Ware, a Board-Certified Master Arborist with Rainbow Ecoscience who covers its Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.
He spoke about tools. “I think having a mallet is one of the most important tools we have as arborists. It helps us understand those things we can’t see.” Other fundamental diagnostic implements Ware recommended included a pocket knife, a magnifying glass, a pole saw/lopper and an air spade. A green laser pointer, he added, “makes it easy for you have clients see what you’re seeing.”
The diagnostic process includes a series of questions, Ware said. To begin with: “What is the plant? What is normal for the plant?” He gave an example from his own experience with a customer upset over a tree dropping its needles. “The client was freaking out, but the reality is that white pine does shed needles periodically.” Other questions include, “What are the common problems with the particular plant?”
Ware talked about the process for understanding a tree’s specific disorder. Start your diagnosis at the base, not the crown, examining it for root flare issues and soil quality. “Half the tree is underground,” he reminded the audience, “so there’s a lot that can happen with the root system.” Then, work your way up through the stem to the crown, where it’s necessary to look for patterns. “Patterns,” he said, “are going to be our friend,” telling us what are the symptoms and their rate of onset. Then, “Get some history! Who has the most history with that tree?” The answer, of course, is “the homeowner — but they’re not looking at trees in the same way we do.”
He concluded by offering suggestions about how to speak with clients to get to the right answers. Find out what’s important to them, first of all. Position yourself. Who are we and why are we there? “I’m Mark Ware,” he said as an example, “And I’m a tree doctor.” Ask permission to offer services. And, finally, educate the prospective customer (as needed). But beware: “You can talk yourself out of work!”
“Start your diagnosis at the base, not the crown.”
“Most decay starts with a wound. Hence, decay is usually off center.”
Chris Luley of Urban Forest Diagnostics LLC, spoke from over forty years’ experience in tree management and diagnostics on the topic of “Heartwood, Heart Rot and Tree Stability.” Luley, author of Wood Decay Fungi of Living Urban Trees, posed some pressing questions. “Do all trees form heartwood? Can heartwood decay also affect sapwood? Is all heartwood more resistant to decay? And why is heart rot not typically important to tree stability?
Luley spoke about the inconsistent use of the term “heart rot,” and of the term “heartwood,” which he called “a complete mess.”
He discussed the CODIT theory originated by Alex Shigo. The sapwood, he said, stores energy with living cells. Wall Four, with its high suberin (wax) content, seals off the sapwood. He shared another term as well: “ripewood,” which means heartwood that is not different in color than sapwood. Some trees do not form heartwood at all, for example populus, acer, betula and fagus. One scientist has suggested that the center of maples “should simply be called ‘old wood’.” Heartwood, Luley said, can be found not only in the trunk but in roots near the trunk.
“Most decay,” he suggested, “starts with a wound. Hence, decay is usually off center.” Heartwood infection often starts through dead or pruned branches. Does drilling for a Level 3 Assessment spread decay? “You have to know the type of fungus in question.” In any case, it’s good to avoid cutting a limb too close to the stem.
An important question is how heartwood impacts tree stability. Luley’s conclusion: “Decay in the center of a tree is relatively unimportant.”
Another panel presentation focused on the Pathway to Green Industries program at New York City’s Woodlawn Cemetery. Herb Landmann, a Project Manager and ISA Certified Arborist with The Davey Tree Expert Company and a landscaping grounds maintenance instructor with the Woodlawn program for the last four years, joined the Meg Ventrudo, Executive Director of the Woodlawn Conservancy, Program Manager Jonathan Clemente and Chris Iannelli, The Door Assistant Director of Training and Internships, to describe a work force development course that trains young adults in the skills necessary to obtain entry level positions within parks, zoos, private landscaping firms, cemeteries, maintenance crews and flagging crews.
Ventrudo opened with some background about Woodlawn, established in 1863, whose popularity in the early years “had to do with the development of the railroad — you could rent a funeral car and load it with a casket and a horse cart would meet you at the station and bring you to the cemetery.” The place grew famous during the Gilded Age and became the preferred burial ground for the greats of the Harlem Renaissance.
Landmann described Davey’s inventory of the cemetery’s grounds. It recorded 6,300 trees on 400 acres, including five Great Trees of New York City: an umbrella pine, an Eastern white pine, a cutleaf European beech, a white oak and a European weeping beech (with a 68” DBH!).
The Cemetery introduced the training program in 2020. “It’s an outdoor learning lab,” said Clemente, “a safe and serene environment for young people to work and learn.” Participants, at-risk youth from underserved communities, receive uniforms, metro cards, OSHA cards. It’s “a gateway to employment in New York City.” Interns receive $1,300 worth of certifications alone. It’s a paid position and competitive to get in. Fifteen people are chosen for each ten-week session out of hundreds of applicants, some of whom are homeless or have significant food security issues.
“Some of them have not even held a rake before,” said Landmann. For ten weeks, students spend five hours a day engaging in hands-on activities, including tree ID, equipment safety, tree selection, proper mulching, pruning and turf management. “It’s an urban forest,” he said, “so we have raccoons, coyote, even a nine-point buck. You have to teach the students about poison ivy and brambles. It’s important that everyone goes home safe every day.” There are also the fundamentals of cemetery work. “You have to treat each gravestone as sacred,” he emphasized.
The program includes a mentorship component. Iannelli said, “Years later, we’re still talking to our students and making sure they’re on the right path.”
“Years later, we’re still talking to our students and making sure they’re on the right path.”
Another presentation also focused on urban arboricultural education. Ducep Moreno and Ben Osborne, Assistant Commissioner of Forestry & Horticulture at New York City Parks, walked the audience through the pilot Climber & Pruner Training Program, founded by New York City Parks in July 2023. Osborne shared some statistics: New York is comprised of 59.5 percent built environment and 40.5 percent greenscape. The Parks department manages 4.9 million forest trees.
Climbers and pruners are difficult to recruit and retain. Motivated by a 37% vacancy rate recently, the most sizable in two decades, Parks developed a program that recruits from those already working as Parks employees. It began with 127 applicants, 52 interviewed and 18 selected.
Staff are trained to help maintain over 800,000 street and park trees. The program provides opportunities in a field that might not otherwise be available to residents, with a starting salary of roughly $70K/year. The curriculum includes “purpose-driven tasks — every day a little bit more,” said Moreno. As of the end of January 2024, participants had pruned six hundred mature and two thousand young trees, removed fifty trees, cleared sixty storm sites and planted two hundred park and forest trees.
“If we end up with eighteen or twenty climber/pruners this year, it would be the largest increase in a decade,” emphasized Osborne.
“I’m old enough to know I don’t know anything,” Buckley joked with the overflow crowd. But he clearly did know something about his subject. Foliar nematodes attack seven hundred plant species, he said, in more than seventy-five plant families. “They’re far more active than the root ones,” he said, adding, “I’ve seen diseases in golf turf take about ten years to figure out.” He emphasized basic vigilance, removing and destroying infested plants and keeping foliage dry. “I got thrown out of Home Depot for yanking the ferns out of the pots one time,” he confided.
Buckley showed slides that depicted pathogens at 500x magnification. Sawyer beetles, he said, find and breed in pines; the larvae feed in the cambium before turning into the heartwood, attracted to CO2 emissions. They carry ambrosia or “blue stain” fungus to the tree and nematodes will feed on the fungus after the tree dies. Tree death can occur in as little as thirty days.
As a slight digression, he commented that “All the folks in plant science want to work in the cannabis industry in the air conditioning… I think we have to raise the base salary.”
Speaking about beech leaf disease, he said that it had come to the U.S. in 2012 and spread throughout the whole Northeast in one decade. “There is some evidence,” he said, “that it moves in wind and rain, also birds.”
“Now here’s the ‘tode,” he told the audience, sharing a slide. “They live in the spongy mesophyll cells, and dark bands appear at leaf-out.” BLD appears to be worse in the lower canopy and in saplings. Some fungicides seem promising as treatments: fluopyram, Polyphosphite 30, Broadform, Arbotect 20.
He added, “Look at my photo files and you don’t see my kid at all, I’m just taking pictures of dead stuff. These are like my vacation photos.”
Buckley provided a summary: “I like BLD ‘cause there’s no voodoo — we can find it. I don’t like it ‘cause all the trees are going. What are we going to have on the East Coast, just Tree of Heaven?”
At the customary Association Luncheon, NYSA this year honored the contributions of the New York State Urban Forestry Council. NYSUFC Board Member Terry Hawkridge was pleased to accept the award on behalf of the Council.
