The Bath Division of Forestry has unveiled a new map that allows users to identify and learn about the trees in the city’s urban forest.

“It’s a tool that’s really there for folks to be able to go out and explore, and maybe while they’re exploring learn a little bit more about what they’re seeing,” said City Arborist Kyle Rosenberg.

The Bath Tree Map was made possible through a $7,000 grant from the Maine Forestry Service’s Project Canopy. The grant covered the one-time cost to purchase an ArcGIS license and software, a tablet and consultation on how to use the program.

“ArcGIS is a multi-layer geographic informations systems program, so what we do, we actually have to come up with our own surveys … which build the database,” said Rosenberg. “And through the database and the recording of longitude and latitude coordinates for each tree we can turn that into a map.”

Rosenberg and a number of volunteers can go out into the city and document public trees, inputting information into the database that ArcGIS uses to generate the Bath Tree Map. Rosenberg said that it takes 3-5 minutes to collect the necessary data for each tree.

On the map, city residents and visitors can locate various public trees and access pertinent information, including a tree’s common name, genus, species and diameter. Each entry also includes a picture and when the tree was added to the inventory. A link on the page allows users to see the approximate value that each tree provides to the city.

The Bath Tree Map is a useful educational tool for those looking to learn more about Bath’s urban forest, and is an effective tool for the Bath Division of Forestry.

“That’s just a snapshot of the overall database that we build for these trees,” said Rosenberg. “So a lot of the information they don’t see would be a lot of the management related pieces of information, such as the overall condition, whether there are power lines overhead, if there’s a defect, what type of defect it is, and right now I’m building into that a tree risk assessment protocol.”

The city can also use the software to track calls and service requests to identify what areas are having repeat issues or to see where a problem is geographically centered.

“If we have 50 calls for brown tail moth, I can bring up a map that shows me just those calls and shows me where the highest density of calls are coming from in the city,” said Rosenberg.

“We’re just beginning to use the technology to its fullest,” he added.

More than 700 trees have been catalogued so far, and the previous database the department used contained around 6,000 public trees. Rosenberg said that it would take “probably at least another year” to create a complete inventory on the public trees in ArcGIS, even with help from volunteers from the Bath Community Forestry Committee and various school groups.

Rosenberg said he was excited about the possibilities that the Bath Tree Map presented for educational opportunities.

“The teacher can literally have this on her smartphone or his smartphone and take the kids for a walk in one of the parks and discuss the trees and know exactly which tree it is and what the species is,” he said. “We’re hoping to actually design curriculum around that, where they take the information that’s on the smartphone and go out into the field with maybe some additional data and learn more about the trees, and maybe learn about urban forestry as a whole.

“That’s the overall goal of the project — to get folks in the community more aware about the urban forest,” he added. “So if we can spend a little bit of time with a few volunteers and send them out with a tablet and they can do this themselves, then that’s a great way for them to explore and maybe learn a couple new trees in the process.”

Residents can explore the Bath Tree Map via a link on the Bath Division of Forestry website at cityofbath.com/forestry.

nstrout@timesrecord

$7,000 grant

• THE BATH TREE MAP was made possible through a $7,000 grant from the Maine Forestry Service’s Project Canopy. The grant covered the one-time cost to purchase an ArcGIS license and software, a tablet and consultation on how to use the program.