Tree Physique!: February 2008 Archives

Defective trees can cause personal injury and property damage. Hazard tree management has increased in recent years due to safety and liability concerns resulting from preventable accidents. A “hazard tree” is a tree with structural defects likely to cause failure of all or part of the tree, which could strike a “target.” A target can be a vehicle, building, or a place where people gather such as a park bench, picnic table, street, or backyard.

Inspecting Trees

Consider the items on this checklist when inspecting your trees:

• Tree Condition: Poor conditions include many dead twigs, dead branches or small, off-color leaves. Good conditions include full crowns, vigorous branches, and healthy, full-sized leaves. But you need to look further...for the health of branches and trunks.
• Tree Species can affect hazards because come tree species are prone to specific types of defects. For example aspen are prone to youthful breaks due to decay; some species of maple and ash can form weak branch unions.
• Tree Age and Size are affected by constant stress. Older trees that have accumulated multiple defecs and extensive decay can be especially prone to damage.

Inspect your trees every year. A thorough inspection is easiest after leaf drop in the fall, and after leaf-out in spring. It's important to routinely inspect trees after every severe storm.

Look for dead wood, cracks, weak branch unions, decay, cankers, root problems, and poor tree architecture.

Corrective action provides some choices, depending on the problems. You can move the tree to a better location; prune the tree or remove the tree.

For more thorough guidelines on "Recognizing Hazardous Defects in Trees," check out this helpful and estensive on-line guidebook by the USDA Forest Service.

SOURCE: Forest Service: Recognize Hazardous Defects in Trees

PROBLEM: Danger and liability

SOLUTION: Regular inspection and care of your trees with pruning, cabling, bracing or tranpanting, or removal of the tree.

Trees are the muscles of our  habitat.  They do some pretty heavy work -- they anchor the soil, convert humidity into  moisture for the soil, break rocks into smaller pebbles, and after all that work, they convert their leaves into humus, their limbs and trunks into humble soil.  And they are home and shelter for thousands of different kinds of insects, birds, mammals, worms and microbes. And they store carbon.

“It’s probably a nice thing to do, but planting trees is not a quantitative solution to the real problem. If you plant a tree (CO2 reductions are) only temporary for the life of the tree. If you don’t emit in the first place, then that permanently reduces CO2.” Dr. Philip Duffy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

And trees aren't permanent!  Surprise! :-)  But some, like the giant sequoias are closer to permanent than many buildings and energy reduction schemes.

But forests as a whole are permanent -- one generation feeding the next.  Carbon is the stuff of life...and trees are the staff of carbon.

PROBLEM: Carbon emissions are creating stress on natural systems that recycle CO2.

SOLUTION: Planting and maintaining trees through MATURITY adds filtration, water retention, shade for hot urban centers, soil replenishment, habitat for wildlife, as well as windbreaks for homes, shade to reduce utility usage, and adds to the livability and value of a building -- whether a home or commercial building.  Trees work hard for us!