Where to turn: Volunteers or contractors
Most successful urban forestry and tree equity programs depend on volunteers not just for planning but also for implementation of their initiatives. Whichever you choose — volunteers, contractors or both — professional arborists or urban foresters will need to help plan and supervise your projects. These cities use different mixes of paid staff, contractors and volunteer networks.
Contracted maintenance makes sense for larger communities with expansive canopy and the need to manage frequent, regular inventory assessments. Many of the larger companies offer public-facing webpages to track trees, manage workflow and in many cases, create a growing network of resident tree activists.
Training volunteers
Volunteers don’t need all the skills of a certified arborist. But they do need initial and continuing education about tree growth and condition, markers of decline and the presence of pests and disease. Seattle’s Forest Steward Field Guide covers virtually all the bases.
Training. Many communities have published guides for training community tree volunteers. The Green Seattle Partnership’s Forest Steward Field Guide — newly revised in 2024 — is one of the most comprehensive. Often these same volunteers can be mobilized to act as advocates for tree equity.
Advocacy. Casey Trees in Washington DC offers an Advocacy Handbook and training to help them succeed. And the Girl Scouts have published a guide to to the why’s and how’s of tree planting that as useful for adults as it is for kids.
Mulch and water. Trained staff member or volunteer arborist should review newly-planted trees and determine that they are planted, mulched and watered appropriately.
After the trees are planted. Depending on the number of trees and the number of planting volunteers, you may need to plan supplementary activities that volunteers might enjoy and appreciate.
Well-trained volunteers often produce results similar to those returned by trained staff at significantly lower cost.
Assuring data quality and consistency
Organizations that rely on volunteers risk inconsistencies in their data quality. But mature programs have identified steps you can take to minimize them.
For quality assurance, repeated measurements can be made on the same trees using different volunteer crews (i.e., in schools, different grade level science classes can repeat measurements).
When differences are found between data sets collected on the same tree, ask volunteers to collect a third set of measurements and resolve the issue.
For more complicated field measurements, it may be useful to have a trained supervisor on call to help with assessments