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Working to protect and advocate for trees in urban Washington County
Benefits of Trees
The Davey Forestry & US Forest Service have sponsored a tool used widely in the US for calculating the cost benefits of urban trees. Members of the TreekeepersWC team use this tool to provide data regarding fiscal benefits of trees - by species, by size and by location. The i-tree About | i-Tree (itreetools.org) and treebenefits National Tree Benefit Calculator (treebenefits.com) tools are available to the public online. Note: the treebenefits tool takes into consideration the property values benefits whereas the i-tree tool does not add in this number.
A mature tree is often 70 times as beneficial to the environment as a newly planted tree. Existing trees sequester carbon, lower the temperature of neighborhoods, filter stormwater and slow runoff, and produce oxygen as well as habitat for wildlife. And there are many other benefits of existing trees.
For a planting cost of $250-600 (includes first 3 years of maintenance) a single street tree returns over $90,000 of direct benefits (not including aesthetic, social and natural) in the lifetime of the tree. Street trees (generally planted from 4 feet to 8 feet from curbs) provide many benefits to those streets they occupy. Trees-In-Cities-Keep-Us-Healthy.pdf (bluezones.com)
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