For the second year in a row, the Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards paired with the Charlottesville Tree Commission to plant trees on private property around the Belmont area. With a generous grant from the Ballyshannon Fund, we acquired 23 trees for the project. On the chilly morning of November 9, five teams of CATS members and Tree Steward trainees, joined by seven members of the Tree Commission, planted the trees at various locations around the neighborhood and advised homeowners on how to maintain them.
The principal objective of these projects is to increase Charlottesville’s tree canopy, which is measured every five years by aerial photography and is on the decline. The city’s tree canopy dropped from 50 percent in 2004 to 45 percent in 2014, and we expect to see a further decrease when the next aerial survey is completed in 2020. Planting trees in the yards of homes and on other private property is critical to reversing this trend. CATS urges people in the community to help us identify other Charlottesville neighborhoods that suffer from a sparse canopy and that could benefit from the environmental and economic advantages of having more trees.