To Remove or Not to Remove: The Tree Removal Question
Mike Trumbauer, CERP
Biohabitats, Inc.
Baltimore, MD
In the process of determining the optimal restoration strategy for a given site, restoration practitioners are faced with a myriad of decisions. One that is gaining public attention is the removal of trees. We all have our ways to justify removals for the greater good of stream restoration – e.g., it’s going to fall into the stream anyway, we are going to plant hundreds of tiny new trees, it’s just another tulip poplar. Generally, we have predetermined that intervening in the riparian system is the greater good; therefore, we are justified in removing trees. Arguably, we have the right intent but is our idealized vision for a stream restoration always the greater good? Do we understand the timescales for recovery? Do we know the lifespan of our intervention? Do our interventions scale with natural disturbance regimes? Could something else be done? What if we did nothing? These answers all depend on the context and no single approach applies to every context. The intent of this presentation is to dive into these questions to start a dialog, explore potential recovery trajectories, discuss novel approaches, and plant the seeds to answer the tree removal question in a holistic manner.
About Mike Trumbauer, CERP
Mr. Trumbauer is a certified ecological restoration practitioner and the Chesapeake/Delaware Bays Bioregion Team Leader at Biohabitats. Over his career, he has focused on understanding of the physical processes that shape river systems and applied this knowledge to enhance the ecological structure and function of streams and rivers in both urban and rural settings in the Mid-Atlantic region.
