Langley City’s Urban Forest: A Matter of Equality

As you may know, Langley City has been working on our first Urban Forest Management Strategy. The strategy’s primary goals are to increase the health of our urban forest and the tree canopy cover in our community from about 17% today to 20% by 2046, reserving the slow decline in canopy cover which has happened over the last few decades.

Langley City Council received a presentation on a draft version of our proposed Urban Forest Management Strategy at last Monday’s Council meeting. The strategy’s authors sought feedback from Council before it goes out for further public feedback. I will post about the draft set of recommendations tomorrow. I wanted to focus on some of the information on the current state of our urban forest today.

About two-thirds of our urban forest is on private land. While tree cover has increased on public land, it has decreased on private land.

Our urban forest is not evenly distributed; American Forests created a metric called the Tree Equity Score. This scoring system looks at metrics such as current tree canopy cover, building density, and surface temperature, as well as social metrics such as income, race, age, and gender. It highlights where we are doing well and where we need to improve our urban forest. The following map should come as no surprise. We need to focus on the northern part of our community.

A map of Langley City’s Tree Equity Score. Red is worse. Green is better. Select the map to enlarge.

The following map shows significant forest stands. We need to protect and enhance these areas.

Map of significant forest stands. The darker the green, the more significant. Select the map to enlarge.

This final map shows the location of tall trees in our community.

A map of tall trees in Langley City. Select the map to enlarge.

With this information and also based on the initial round of feedback from the community, there is a series of proposed recommendations, as I noted, that will be the topic of tomorrow’s post. Langley City will be seeking more feedback from the community this fall.