New [Fiscal] Year’s Resolution for Your Urban Forestry Program: Stay Healthy

September 25, 2025 |  Robert Seemann, Ian Hanou, Chris Peiffer

If you’ve recently been asked to identify potential efficiencies for your municipal program, streamline deliverables, or otherwise “do more with less”, then you are not alone. Over the past few years historic public funding levels have led to increased investment in municipal urban and community forestry (UCF) programs and resources. Traditionally, the U.S. Forest Service’s Urban & Community Forestry Program has been the primary federal funding source, supporting state UCF programs that, in turn, distribute resources to municipalities and organizations. However, the predictability of this funding is now uncertain. Additionally at the local level, many recently expanded UCF programs are now looking to “tighten their belts” as public investments that bolster municipal UCF programs grow less predictable. We are experiencing a double whammy, first due to changes in federal grants and proposed spending cuts across multiple federal agencies, and secondly, local government economic contraction in many areas. That’s hard on your health.

Why Urban Forestry Program Planning Matters Under Budget Cuts

Unplanned budget deficits and sudden departmental reductions can trigger “crash-diet” scenarios for UCF programs. One of the most unhealthy situations a UCF program can be in is “significantly reduced” in terms of capacity and “reactionary” in terms of management. While a UCF program on a “crash-diet” will cost less than it did the year before, it will also defer critical deliverables (planting, maintenance, and citizen requests) and come up short of achieving long-term goals, including cost efficiency only possible with more stable funding and proactive planning.

Do not let your UCF program fall into this unhealthy scenario due to resource scarcity. Start planning for uncertainty now so that management goals can still be achieved even if capacity and funding are reduced in the near future.

Healthy Choices in Urban Forestry Program Planning

UCF managers should maximize local program levers and make “healthy choices” within anticipated means, so that program momentum may be maintained toward achieving your goals regardless of future capacity. How exactly, you might be thinking? Let’s look at a few examples.

Strategically review your UCF management plan through the lens of your department’s anticipated capacity.

• Be objective about anticipated management and maintenance capacity, not hopeful.
• Actual capacity should inform immediate goals.
• Allow immediate goals to serve as the foundation for long-term goals.
• Don’t have a UCF management plan?? Determine if now’s the time to develop one with this step-by-step guide.

Build partnerships to support urban forestry, shared priorities, and tree maintenance strategies with other departments and local advocacy groups.

• Can a local advocacy group contribute to your tree planting plan, inventory, and canopy coverage goals?
• Can roadside development contribute to maintenance and/or reforestation goals?
• How can capital improvements in development districts contribute to urban forest infrastructure and attainment of UCF goals?

Effective and efficient program goals are meaningful, actionable, measurable and broad enough to capture the benefits of all types of program costs, work, and use of resources.

• In other words, all necessary work being performed by your staff should chip away at one or more management goals. If your management plan is not taking credit for all the work your department does, modify or reword your goals to capture all the work your staff does, even if on a restricted diet for now.
• Ex: If your department is mandated to perform emergency response and debris cleanup activities after a disaster:
  • Ensure that your UCF management plan has response and recovery goals to capture preparedness AND recovery efforts.
  • Risky trees removed or mitigated during a disaster response (by your department or another agency) should count toward your risk abatement goals.
  • Mandated tree work performed in anticipation of and following a disaster has the potential to contribute to other goals in your UCF management plan if you are tracking your assets and work efforts correctly.

If your department needs to “get lean”, set sensible, capacity-driven goals. Start consuming fresh data and use supplemental tools and technologies that boost program metabolism and bridge the gap between reduced capacity and attainable goals.

• Ex: Consider switching from only focusing on “tree stem count” or “tree management activities” to setting canopy cover goals; the free resource linked further below will help! And consider other goals beyond (but informed by) your inventory data (stormwater mitigation, heat reduction, risk assessment, etc).
• Ex: Management goals can efficiently be tracked at the district or census block (neighborhood) level. Use workflows and desktop technology (such as TreePlotter Software) to track and project program success based in those areas.
• Ex. Get in the practice of prioritizing and tracking completed work for areas (neighborhoods or census tracts) as opposed to individual trees. You should be able to deploy maintenance staff to areas where there is a full day of work, or adjacent areas where there is less than a full day of work.

• Resources like the TreeCanopy.us, provided by the USDA Forest Service and the National Arbor Day Foundation, are openly available to the public and provide rapid visualization and mapping features to track land classification change over time. This simple but effective tool can assist communities in setting canopy goals and prioritizing neighborhoods to launch reforestation efforts. Previously, many cities leaned on federally-funded grant programs or local budgets to periodically conduct their own tree canopy assessment.
• Strategic industry partnerships and advancements in AI and machine learning have enabled TreePlotter™ CANOPY to deliver robust land cover datasets with canopy analysis baked in, data sets that are continuously refreshed every two years and acquisition times of days rather than months.
• Mobile 360 degree imagery cameras and LiDAR sensors are becoming commonplace for gray asset inventories. The imagery can be used to extract locations of trees and a variety of physical attributes (height, diameter, crown spread). There are now cost-share opportunities available as many Public Works Departments acquire 360-degree imaging and LiDAR technology, which can be utilized for both gray infrastructure asset management and urban forestry efforts. This technology streamlines the creation and maintenance of foundational datasets by providing highly accurate, up-to-date information that can serve as a common baseline for tracking, planning, and managing both built and natural assets efficiently. Additionally, this prioritizes the trees or areas where an arborist is needed in the field the most, making every staff member as “lean” as possible.

“Don’t starve a program or cut pieces off to reduce costs. Reshape that same program using productivity tools to make it adaptive and poised for demonstrating sustained successes.”

Turning Backlogs Into Success Stories

The desktop technologies we mentioned above will not magically eliminate a backlog of deferred maintenance. However, these systems enable a consistent, transparent approach that will keep your crews from revisiting the same neighborhood three times in the same month for individual maintenance requests. Additionally, when these systems are combined with compatible workflows your maintenance backlog can be transformed into a lean, cohesive set of management goals and action items (both proactive and reactive) that will allow your staff to measure and demonstrate program successes and goal achievement, i.e., turn a backlog of deferred work into a system that demonstrates your staff’s successes.

Sustainable Urban Forestry Program Planning for the Future

In closing we all know crash diets are unhealthy. They may yield short-term results, but are not sustainable. These risks and financial impacts have to be made clear to city councils. Any UCF program, regardless of scale, should be sustainable. The tools linked above have lowered or eliminated traditional barriers (time, software, money, database management, specialized staff) to access robust and fresh tree canopy data for your community. If faced with significant budget or personnel cuts, consider how flexible tools can enable your program to efficiently and effectively administer and consume resource assessments before throwing in the towel on the ability to make data-driven management decisions, which can be critical for long-term success. These are pressing times for our industry that may motivate sustaining programs to “shed a few pounds”. Don’t starve a program or cut pieces off to reduce costs. Reshape that same program using productivity tools to make it adaptive and poised for demonstrating sustained successes.