Is your community struggling to maintain a healthy urban forest on a tight budget? Do you feel like you’re stretching resources and only able to react to diseased and damaged trees, rather than focusing on proactive pruning, planting, diversification, and outreach?
Ruekert & Mielke, in partnership with Wachtel Tree Science, can help your community secure critical funding to supplement your forestry budget and take a proactive approach to managing your urban forest.
Understanding the Need
Urban forests are one of a community’s most valuable, yet often overlooked, resources that provide extensive benefits, including:
Improved air quality
Energy conservation and mitigation of the urban heat island effect
Reduced stormwater runoff and lowered risk of flooding
Economic and social vitality and enhanced beautification
Increased carbon sequestration, making communities more resilient to climate change
However, municipal budgets for managing street trees are often minimal and overlooked, making proactive management difficult to achieve.
How Grants Can Help
Municipalities, counties, tribes, and nonprofit organizations should look to outside funding sources to supplement resources for management, including the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Urban Forestry Grants.
The grants fall into three categories:
Regular Grants: support urban forestry programs, including tree planting, maintenance, and education.
Startup Grants: help communities establish new forestry programs.
Catastrophic Storm Grants: Assist communities recovering from major storm damage.
These grants are cost-share based, covering a percentage of project costs. Applications are due annually on October 1.
Visit Wisconsin DNR Urban Forestry Grants for more details.
We encourage clients to utilize our partnership with Wachtel Tree Science for their expertise and assistance with grant writing. Together, our teams can efficiently inventory your street trees using GIS tools built for field data collection and then turn your inventory data into actionable information. We’ll incorporate the latest data into your GIS system, putting updated important tree health information in the hands of your forestry and public works staff and providing tools to track ongoing maintenance needs. Note that GIS efforts can be included as part of Wisconsin DNR grant requests.
Contact us to capitalize on outside funding sources, urban forestry expertise through Wachtel Tree Science, and R/M’s GIS applications to take the management of one of your community’s greatest resources from reactive to a proactive, long-term approach.
Example GIS Forestry Tools
About the Author
enrika Hlavacek
gis analyst
Enrika has more than ten years of GIS experience, including a strong knowledge of web map and application development, data collection, management, and integration, requirements gathering, and map creation following cartographic design principles. More recently, Enrika’s focus has been on ArcGIS Online administration and customized application development to simultaneously support public-facing communication apps and internal editing workflows.