Public Service Announcement  

Plan puts focus on protecting and enhancing urban forest in HRM

Thursday, April 26 – A second draft of HRM’s Urban Forest Master Plan (UFMP) has been finalized after years of research, public engagement, workshops and reports.  This project milestone reflects the collaborative work of HRM staff and a team of researchers from Dalhousie University’s School for Resource and Environmental Studies (SRES). 

HRM’s urban forest includes all trees within the urban core. Street trees, park trees, trees on private and public land all make up our urban forest. The information included in the UFMP offers ways to ensure a sustainable future for our urban forest and creates awareness about environmental stewardship.

The document will continue to be a work-in-progress but the current UFMP has come together through:

• Tree inventories and environmental benefits reports (2007-2008)
  

• Development of UFMP values, objectives, indicators, targets and actions
  

• Public engagement activities (urban forest walks, focus group workshops) conducted and documented (2010-2011)
  

• Research on issues such as UFMP best practices, climate change effects on urban forests, carbon sequestration, and urban/wildland interface fires (2010-2012)
  

• Mapping of Canopy coverage and land use in the urban forest (2011)

Further work by the Dalhousie research team started this month with a focus on activities such as the completion of the UFMP and UFMP urban forest neighbourhood fact sheets. Public engagement activities are scheduled for May.

The development of the second draft of the UFMP would not have been possible without the help of a dedicated team of reviewers from Atlantic Chapter of the International Society of Arboriculture, Atlantic Provinces Association of Landscape Architects, Ecology Action Centre and the Licensed Professional Planners Association of Nova Scotia.

For more information on HRM’s Urban Forest Master Plan and to access the completed second draft, please visit:

http://www.halifax.ca/RealPropertyPlanning/UFMP/index.html

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Contact:       

                                              
Michaelyn Thompson                            
HRM Communications                           
490-5940

Dr. Peter Duinker
Dalhousie School for Resource and Environmental Studies
494-7100