Hi Architect-US community!
These past months have been really busy at Siteworks. I’m learning a lot, and even though six months have already gone by, I still feel new to working in landscape. Right now, I’ve been diving deep into tree inventories.
When I was working as a residential architect, the only thing I cared about regarding trees was whether a tree already existed or if we were going to propose any shade tree to add to the design. Here in New York, most landscape projects tend to intervene with the existing landscape. That means if there are existing trees, there are important decisions and rules about whether those trees are “protected” or “removals”. Of course, there are also the proposed new trees.
Once you gather all the information about the conditions of trees in your project, you create something called a “TIVR” which stands for Tree Inventory and Value Report. This system and document are used by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, better known as NYC Parks. It comes as an Excel file and is useful to track tree data, assess tree health and risk, and determine the value of urban trees. It also informs management decisions such as maintenance scheduling, pest control, planting strategies, and tree restitution fees that projects must take care of when removing existing trees.
Tree restitution can be a major challenge for a project because NYC Parks establishes a fee per tree and per borough. That means if you remove a tree in Manhattan you must pay for it, and the fee might be different if the tree is located in Queens or Brooklyn. Designers have to be very careful and mindful of design budgets, especially when it comes to existing landscape value. It’s interesting to see how codes and rules affect the way we design and how they push us to be more conscious about nature.
What has surprised me the most is how thorough and careful landscape design is. Every single tree is treated as a unique living piece that needs care, whether it’s pruning, cleaning, watering, transplanting, or even removal, which in itself has its own process and architecture.
Something that happened in one of my projects is that the tree inventory was very difficult to make because of the location and the season. The inventory was set in a park near a highway uptown, which made it very hard and almost impossible to access the site and analyze the trees. In the end, we created the inventory using high-resolution aerial photography from Google Earth, along with knowledge of the area. That way we managed to identify species, establish tendencies, and complete the TIVR. It was great, as a J1 trainee, to learn about these procedures but also to share my input on how new technologies can help the work designers do.
It’s very clear that New York City’s beauty is not accidental. There is a lot of work and regulation that makes it possible, and every design, even the smallest one, gets an incredible amount of care and attention to standards. That is what makes the beauty of this city stand out.
