Written By Kavita Karmarkar
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This past Thursday August 1st 2019, EPMA-ers gathered at the SW Corridor Park for an evening of good food and knowledge. Swapnil, one of our volunteers, did a fantastic job organizing the event complete with sumptuous food from Whole Heart Provisions and lawn games.
The highlight of the evening was getting to know the work done by David Meshoulam and his organization ‘Speak for the Trees’. David has been an educator for the past 15 years and is passionate about having new generations understand the deep links between science, culture, and nature. The main mission of Speak for the Trees is to improve the size and health of the urban tree canopy in the Greater Boston Area. They undertake various efforts for advocacy and outreach, but one of their main initiatives is to map, measure, and account for every street tree in the Boston area with the Tree Urban Teen Corps program (TUTC). For this, they properly train their “volun-trees” (that’s a good one) to identify and measure all attributes of the trees. They use their own software, ‘OpenTreeMap’, where anyone can see the street tree cover in their neighborhood, if it has been mapped. For anyone interested in participating in this and many other activities they do, please see their website https://www.sfttbos.org/. Two of our volunteers got a glimpse of the unique characteristics of the trees around us and how to correctly identify them.
Thank you to David and all the people who made it to the event.
EPMA would like to say thank you to Pare Corporation who generously sponsored this event. Lindsey Machamer was representing Pare Corporation. Pare corporation understands the value of urban open space and trees from the substantial effect they can have on stormwater management. Pare is working with some local sewer authorities to plan green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) in available public open space. GSI can help to improve water quality by removing pollutants from stormwater, reducing flows into the combined sewer system, and mitigating flooding impacts.
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