Fredericksburg Launches Public Tree Inventory
Users can look up every tree planted in public spaces throughout the city, and request maintenance or new plantings.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
Email Adele
A new dashboard launched this week allows users to look up the type and condition of every tree planted in public areas in Fredericksburg City.
Our Urban Forest contains an inventory of all 12,557 public trees and 340 available planting spaces.
Tree Fredericksburg, a nonprofit that has partnered with the City of Fredericksburg and Friends of the Rappahannock to plant, replant, and care for the city’s trees, provided the basis for the inventory, and volunteers visited every tree last summer to take pictures and measurements and assess the tree’s condition.
“I think this is a really great tool for the city and I think our city arborist [Bicknell Robbins] is doing a phenomenal job of picking up where we left off,” said Anne Little, executive director of Tree Fredericksburg.
Robbins was hired as the city’s full-time arborist in 2023, in preparation for Tree Fredericksburg to transition care and maintenance of the city’s trees to the public works department.
Through the tree inventory, users can also request maintenance on a certain tree or ask for one to be planted in an empty tree well.
According to the tree inventory, the most common type of street tree in the city is the red maple. There are 1,729 of these are planted around town. The next most popular tree is the crape myrtle (852), followed by the Yoshino cherry (435), the eastern redbud (407), the swamp white oak (359), the “Village Green” Japanese zelkova (346), and the trident maple and willow oak (314 of each).
The dashboard also contains GIS maps prepared by Green Infrastructure Inc. and students at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture that show the existing tree canopy, the percent coverage, and potential planting areas.
According to the canopy coverage map, there are a few places in the city with more than 50% coverage, largely in neighborhoods south of the Blue and Gray Parkway and west of the Battlefield Industrial Park.
Most of downtown south of William Street, as well as north of the canal, has less than 25% canopy coverage, and neighborhoods to the east of Interstate 95 largely have less than 15% canopy coverage, according to the map.
Little said the city’s tree canopy has declined since 2012, from 44% to 36%.
There are potential planting areas identified all around the city, with larger areas identified around the Fredericksburg Fairgrounds, the Battlefield Industrial Park, Old Mill Park, the Huntington Hills neighborhood, the Hugh Mercer Elementary School campus, around Valor Apartments and Riverside Manor, and Celebrate Virginia South.
Fredericksburg’s Specimen Tree Mitigation Fund supports the care of “existing and future trees,” according to a January news release on the city’s website.
A bill passed by the General Assembly and currently awaiting action by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin would allow localities’ tree canopy funds to be used to plant and maintain trees on both public and private property.
Until then, or if Youngkin vetoes the bill, private property owners who would like to have trees planted can reach out to Friends of the Rappahannock, Little said.
Tree Fredericksburg plans to give away 7,000 native trees this year, Little said. All 3,500 the organization will hand out this spring have already been spoken for, but for information about the fall give-away, members of the community should sign up for the newsletter.
Local Obituaries
To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.
Support Award-winning, Locally Focused Journalism
The FXBG Advance cuts through the talking points to deliver both incisive and informative news about the issues, people, and organizations that daily affect your life. And we do it in a multi-partisan format that has no equal in this region. Over the past year, our reporting was:
First to break the story of Stafford Board of Supervisors dismissing a citizen library board member for “misconduct,” without informing the citizen or explaining what the person allegedly did wrong.
First to explain falling water levels in the Rappahannock Canal.
First to detail controversial traffic numbers submitted by Stafford staff on the Buc-ee’s project
Our media group also offers the most-extensive election coverage in the region and regular columnists like:
And our newsroom is led by the most-experienced and most-awarded journalists in the region — Adele Uphaus (Managing Editor and multiple VPA award-winner) and Martin Davis (Editor-in-Chief, 2022 Opinion Writer of the Year in Virginia and more than 25 years reporting from around the country and the world).
For just $8 a month, you can help support top-flight journalism that puts people over policies.
Your contributions 100% support our journalists.
Help us as we continue to grow!
This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”