Salem Completes City-Wide Street Tree Inventory

The City of Salem and its consulting engineering, New England Civil Engineering (NECE), have completed a year-long inventory of all 4,812 street tree and tree locations on the 98 miles of City streets in Salem. This work was made possible by a grant from the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation’s Urban and community Forestry Challenge Grant program and comes a year after completion of an initial inventory of street trees on the city’s major entrance corridors. The corridors inventory was funded by City dollars and the Salem Mass in Motion health and wellness program.

For the inventory, NECE GPS-located all street trees and street tree pits, identifying that a total of 4,435 (or 92%) of tree pits had a tree and 377 (or 8%) had stumps or were empty. They then cataloged the condition of all 4,435 existing trees and recommended maintenance for each based on those conditions.

The collected data will be utilized by the City to budget and plan for maintenance of existing trees and stump removals, and also prioritize and budget for future tree plantings. The City hopes to expand the data in the future by including an inventory of additional City trees at parks, cemeteries, schools, and other public spaces.

Both the corridor inventory and the now complete city-wide inventory can be found at www.salem.com/trees.

“Having this data is enormously helpful in allowing us to proceed with our tree planning and maintenance work in a strategic, pro-active, and thoughtful manner,” said Mayor Kim Driscoll. “I’m grateful to all of the City staff, consultants, and volunteers, including the LORAX Task Force, who all worked to make this comprehensive study possible. I also want to thank the Baker administration and DCR for making these funds available, as well as Barbara Warren and Salem Sound Coastwatch for their guidance and support throughout the inventory process. Salem has been a designated ‘Tree City USA’ by the Arbor Day Foundation since 2001 and we place a high priority on maintaining and managing our public trees, both for quality of life and for environmental and health reasons. This fiscal year we’ve allocated close to $150,000 to plant around 300 new trees in every neighborhood across our community. I’m proud of the work that has been done and looking forward to accomplishing even more thanks to the completion of this important inventory.”