IPED Development Team

From Bugwoodwiki

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		Tools for Assessing and Managing Community Forests

Development

Communities conduct tree inventories as part of ongoing efforts to manage their urban forests, maintain acceptable tree canopy cover, and manage tree risk. For this pilot project, programmers added an I-PED function tab to an existing inventory software program called the Mobile Community Tree Inventory(MCTI), part of the nationally acclaimed i-Tree suite of urban forest management tools developed by the U.S. Forest Service and supported by The Davey Institute.

For more information about i-Tree software, visit http://www.itreetools.org/. Requests for the pilot version of the MCTI program with the I-PED tab should be directed to the project contacts listed in this briefing paper.

The development and use of I-PED will:

• Increase and broaden efforts to detect exotic pests.
• Increase awareness of the need for routine tree health assessments.
• Provide a standardized method for integrating pest detection with urban forest management.
• Improve opportunities to control pests while invasions are still manageable.
• Reduce unchecked movement of pests across geographic and political boundaries.
• Reduce costs for long-term tree management, removal, and replacement.
• Provide a tool for integrating pest detection with more innovative, technologically advanced tree inventory and assessment tools.

Team

A project planning and development team is working to move this effort forward. Team subgroups are focusing on pest signs and symptoms, MCTI programming, pilot community involvement, research database development, and online resources. The team includes employees of several U.S. Department of Agriculture agencies, including the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and the Forest Service Northern Research Station and the Northeastern Area State and Private Forestry’s Urban and Community Forestry and Forest Health Protection Programs. Other team members represent the Society of Municipal Arborists, The Davey Institute, Ohio Department of Natural Resources, and the University of Georgia Bugwood Network. The Davey Institute manages the project planning team under contract.