BRISTOL — Several local and regional urban forestry practitioners and community leaders have been invited to address the link between healthy trees and healthy communities at the fourth annual Vermont Tree Stewards Conference on Saturday, Oct. 10, in downtown Bristol.
Registration is $12 for the conference, which will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Holley Hall, 1 South St. Anyone interested in the stewardship and management of the state’s urban and community forests is welcome to attend.
Visit go.uvm.edu/treestewards for the conference agenda, speaker profiles and registration information. To request a disability-related accommodation to attend, contact Elise Schadler at (802) 656-2657 or (800) 571-0668.
The conference, which is sponsored by the Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Program (VT UCF), will feature several experts including keynote speaker Andy Hillman whose two-part talk will focus on reasons why trees planted in communities do not always thrive and ways to ensure successful establishment and growth of urban and community forests. Hillman is a senior consulting urban forester with the Davey Resource Group.
David Raphael, founder of LandWorks in Middlebury, will discuss the benefits trees bring to communities from a planning perspective. Mollie Klepack, VT UCF’s pest outreach coordinator, will offer an update on three invasive pests with the potential to threaten the state’s forests.
Afternoon sessions include a report by the Bristol Conservation Commission on its community forestry projects and seeing trees through a camera lens with Elise Schadler, VT UCF coordinator, and Lee Krohn, senior planner with the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission.
VJ Comai, Vermont’s arborist representative with the Bartlett Tree Expert Co., will lead a tree walk on Bristol’s Town Green to demonstrate how he assesses a tree’s health. Among the areas he will cover are root collar examination, how to read bud scars to determine tree growth, common insect and disease problems and proper planting depth.
VT UCF is a joint program of the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation and University of Vermont Extension.