How many trees are on VCU’s campuses

By Amelia Heymann

Wearing bright orange safety vests, two women diligently investigate the area near James Branch Cabell Library. They aren't looking at the street - though they have been mistaken for parking enforcement officers. They're aiming higher.

The two are interns with Virginia Commonwealth University's Rice Rivers Center, and they are part of a four-person team with a lofty goal: creating a comprehensive tree inventory of VCU's Monroe Park and MCV campuses, to highlight the trees' environmental impact on Richmond. The tree inventory team members are part of the Summer@Rice field research internship program, a joint effort between the Rice Rivers Center and School of Life Sciences and Sustainability. Over the summer, interns worked with faculty and community partners to learn valuable field-based skills and participate in group excursions. Interns were also paid a stipend for their work. In the fall, interns take a course dedicated to completing final projects based on the Summer@Rice research experience.

Adopted in 2024, the One VCU Sustainability Plan, a first-of-its-kind initiative on campus, is designed to embed sustainability, outreach and innovation throughout the academic and health system realms. Lloyd Blake, the urban gardens and forestry program manager with VCU Sustainability, said the tree inventory aligns with the plan because the first step to managing resources is to know what resources there are.

"We want to make sure the campus remains a pleasant place to be," Blake said. "And then there's also some environmental and climate benefits to keeping the campus shady enough in the summer and providing some of these ecosystem services like cleaner air."

Roots of the project

Catherine Viverette, Ph.D., director of student engagement at the Rice Rivers Center, said people don't often think about trees in a city being an urban forest, but that's exactly what they are.

Viverette said the seed of the tree inventory initiative was planted in Panama. For years, VCU students would visit the country to volunteer with the nonprofit Adopt a Panama Rainforest Association, whose conservation initiatives include planting trees.

This gave rise to Viverette's urban ecology course at VCU, which included the Carver Tree Project, a collaboration with VCU Sustainability, that included an inventory in the campus-adjacent neighborhood. In 2020, she and her students were unable to travel around the city amid pandemic restrictions, so they began documenting trees on campus.

Margaret Pletcher and Daniella Asnicar gather data as part of an inventory of VCU's trees. (Amelia Heymann, Enterprise Marketing and Communications)

While they didn't finish the initial catalog, the mission resumed when Blake and Paul Thrift, grounds superintendent with VCU Facilities Management, wanted to apply for a Tree Campus Higher Education accreditation from the Arbor Day Foundation - which requires student participation and community impact.

"Doing the tree inventory checks several boxes," Viverette said. "It involves students. It's community engagement because many of the trees on the campus belong to the city," though VCU cares for them because of their proximity to campus buildings.

The value of a tree inventory

Once all of the trees have been logged, the student interns will analyze the data to highlight the value to the ecosystem, such as how much carbon is sequestered, oxygen is produced and rainfall runoff is mitigated. Viverette said this information also points to the financial impact trees have on the community.

"That analysis give both the community and the university powers to make decisions about tree care," she said.

Danielle Asnicar, a graduate student in the School of Life Sciences and Sustainability and an intern with Rice, became aware of the inventory when she took Viverette's ecology class in 2024. Its students surveyed trees in Maymont, much in the same way the team is doing on campus now.

Asnicar became interested in examining a natural resource and being able to assign a value to it, which can promote its protection.

"Especially on an urban campus like this … you need a reason to keep these trees on campus," Asnicar said. "Inventorying them and finding their value is how you get the university powers to prioritize them."

What it takes to document an urban forest

Students are using the app ESRI ArcGIS Field Maps to create an inventory of the trees on VCU's campuses. (Contributed)

The student interns work for four to six hours a day documenting the trees on VCU's campuses. Since late March, the team has inventoried more than 3,000 trees.

The team is using the app ESRI ArcGIS Field Maps to log the trees on campus. The app pinpoints the tree's location, and the interns add data such as genus and species, trunk circumference and overall height. The students then use the iTree Eco app to generate an estimate of a tree's impact in sequestering carbon and producing oxygen.

Margaret Pletcher, an undergraduate environmental studies major and intern with Rice, said that in addition to physical measurements, the team is documenting if the trees are in a tree well, need maintenance or are in contact with power lines - all of which can help Facilities Management. The team started with logs from 2013 and 2021 and is verifying if each tree is still there, as well as logging new and undocumented trees.

After surveying so many, Asnicar can now identify some trees just by looking at them.

"This is a willow oak," she said, pointing at a large tree outside Cabell Library. "The bark is like an oak, and you see these long oval-shaped leaves."

Some colorful moments with the audience

Asnicar describes identifying trees like defining your friends - they all have their unique characteristics.

"They have different personalities," Pletcher added.

So do the people who see the team at work, and being out in the field every day, the members have had their fair share of interesting interactions. Pletcher said a man who mistook two members for parking officers - "and was gonna curse you guys out," she recalled him saying - ended up talking about his own trees.

"Everyone has their own connection to what we're doing," Asnicar said. "Or they're just flat-out curious. Why are these people in orange vests? They're like hugging the tree right now," referring to how it looks when she takes measurements of a tree trunk.

Asnicar and Pletcher both agreed that their work is rewarding because it is serving a larger cause.

"I like knowing that what I'm doing will have some result," Pletcher said. "And if I can look back in a semester and see that VCU took what we've done with inventorying and valuing [the trees] and prioritize their protection or management, I would feel really great about that."