Because you’ve recruited key players, assigned responsibilities and trained together, your team is already prepared to hit the ground. But depending on the intensity of the threat and the solutions available – their work may not end quickly. And it may change as response efforts transition into recovery, then mitigation and ultimately long-term defense of your tree canopy.
Each step is different and may require different skills from new partners as well as assured longer-term funding.
A guide to mobilizing forest health teams
This comprehensive checklist can apply to virtually any invasive forest pest or disease in your community.
While you may not fully address all the items, your team’s leadership should review each recommended action and make a considered decision about how to respond.
Action | What to do | Why do it |
Confirm the sighting | Before you mobilize your team and start spending, you need to determine the nature and extent of the problem. This may require sampling a number of suspect trees.
Share your findings with your lead state agency. | The state agency will pass it on to the two USDA agencies responsible for invasive urban forest pests and diseases: APHIS-PPQ and the Forest Service.
Taking this critical step fosters both interstate and multi-state coordination and eradication efforts. It opens the possibility of a federal disaster declaration and ultimately federal funding to support your efforts. |
Vest control of response with the lead state agency | Ideally, you’ll already have liaised with your state agency responsible for pests and plant diseases.
At this point, you should confirm the agency’s role, assess opportunities for coordination with other jurisdictions issues of strategy, confirm the response strategy and lay out lines of accountability and communication. | In almost all cases, state agency leadership makes it easier to work both nationally and locally. The agency is best positioned to access federal resources, and to mobilize joint action with other nearby communities.
These early contacts are critical to clarifying individual roles and responsibilities. With internal communications protocols established, response efforts can remain focused. Assigning a single person or entity to handle external communications will tamp down confusion, promote realistic public expectations and perhaps calm opponents. |
Assemble the team | Work with the lead agency to assemble a response team that includes professionals with specific expertise needed to combat the threat. Don’t cold call. | Some folks won’t answer. And the rest must climb a steep learning curve before they can work together effectively. |
Learn and train | In the case of complex incidents – like pest and disease mitigation – every team member needs to understand the role they’ll play, how they will communicate with one another, when and who makes actionable decisions, and where their accountability begins and ends. | Effective teams must learn to work together before the alarm sounds.
You needn’t invent the process. There’s a framework in place that’s been proven to work in most every circumstance where multiple agencies with different expertise must work together. It’s called the Incident Command System. Internal Link to post with explanatory material.
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Reconnaissance | As the team assembles, you’ll need to identify where the problem is most severe and where steps might be taken to mitigate it. | Accuracy is important; even a single tree left outside the boundary for action may nullify your efforts. Funds allocated to careful inspections, frequent inventories in affected areas, canopy analysis and public education can have an outsized return on your investment in mitigation.
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Determine who decides what | While ICS teams work as a unit, some issues (like resource allocation) aren’t suitable for decision by consensus. For each incident, you’ll need to identify a management panel to make these choices. | Different types of incidents may require participants with special expertise, community relationships or policy responsibilities. Understanding in advance who on the team – or what entity – will have decision authority can speed action and ensure community priorities are reflected in response and mitigation. |
Mobilize community partners | Successful action depends in large part on enabling individuals and organizations to help with detection and mitigation. Long before tackling any infestation, identify and engage partners (e.g., schools and parents, scouts, business groups, community organizations, local conservation groups and more). | Pests and disease aren’t simply ecological phenomena. These incidents can erase local landmarks, disrupt businesses and transform the character of neighborhoods. Fewer trees mean hotter streets, more childhood asthma, compromised school outcomes.
Helping people understand the threat, recognize the peril to themselves and learn how they can help before the fact will put more boots on the ground, more quickly, with greater impact.
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Affirm your response strategy | Review your community and state rules for protecting forest health. These regulations can influence how infestations are managed.
Properly framed they can offer significant latitude to fit responses to the problem at hand. On the other hand, vague or highly prescriptive rules can unduly limit your freedom of action. | Tree pests and disease problems are notoriously fickle; they don’t always follow established patterns. Some incidents may require biologic intervention, others the identification and removal of infected trees. Integrated pest management strategies support a continuum of actions calibrated to minimize harm to human health and biodiversity. With this philosophy of graduated response already embedded in local law and policy, you won’t need to shelve your plans while elected officials and judges wrestle with issues well outside of their technical expertise. Even if they make the right decision for your community, you may have already suffered considerable damage to your tree canopy.
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Seek an emergency declaration | Whether from the mayor, your local government or the feds, seek a formal declaration of emergencies. Your ICS members and community stakeholders can help you make the case. | Whether from the mayor, the governor or the feds, when emergencies are declared, resources for response are more likely to flow. |
Deploy your troops | If your plan depends on volunteer efforts, engage affected residents and business owners as early as possible. | They can help shape an effective plan. More importantly, you’ll need their help to execute it. Businesses have a stake in the health of their streetscape; residents in their neighborhood tree canopy. Each can be a source of volunteers – serving as scouts or in the field helping to implement eradication efforts.
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Disposal and mitigation | While this will take place after the fact, you should prepare for disposal and mitigation long before the first tree or stand is treated. | When trees or their parts are removed, often the disease or pest moves with it. To avoid re-introduction, you should have selected appropriate dump sites for infected debris, and make certain rules, incentives and guidelines are in place to assure compliance by all.
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Recovery and resilience | It’s not just a challenge; it’s also an opportunity. Your revegetation strategy should be aimed at improving the health, climate resilience and biodiversity of your urban forest. Common practices include requirements to plant native and climate-adaptable trees.
| Unless you want to work through endless cycles of “discovery and recovery,” it simply makes sense to invest in resilience when you’re already doing the work. |