MENOMONIE — With Arbor Day landing on this past Friday, the City of Menomonie celebrates their commitment to protecting their natural resources by following the tradition of planting a tree.
“Because Menomonie is a certified Tree City USA, this fulfills part of our requirement to maintain that certification: having an Arbor Day celebration, promoting healthy urban canopy, planting trees and education outreach to get more people excited about planting trees and having trees in the city,” said Liz Usborne, a member of the Urban Forestry board in Menomonie.
Origins of Arbor Day date back to 1872 in Nebraska, with the holiday landing on the last Friday of April.
As members of the Urban Forestry board, Usborne said they serve in an advisory capacity helping guide the city’s priorities and goals for diversifying the urban tree canopy.
But in recent years, another part of their job has been tackling environmental concerns that the city faces as the Emerald Ash Borer continues to kill off Ash Trees, a native species of tree to our state. In their estimates, the city has lost about 390 of these trees as the wood-boring beetle slowly continues to spread north in the state of Wisconsin.
Megan Hines, environmental program coordinator for the city, said they have been really devastated by the impact of the EAB as it has had a major impact on their tree canopy.
One way to combat that is by planting a diverse range of trees in the area to combat that dramatic loss. With different types of trees, the state faces a much smaller risk in the future with potential diseases and invasive species taking out certain species of trees. Part of the struggle with the EAB killing many Ash Trees is that they make up an estimated 7.8% of all trees, 898 million, in Wisconsin’s forests, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
“We’re making efforts to plant trees back, but the pace that they are being infested — we can’t keep up,” she said. “So, we’ve been lucky to have a DNR grant last year that helped us plant over 100 trees. This year we don’t have that grant, but we’re planting about 65 trees and we’re working on a DNR grant through the Inflation Reduction Act right now as we are hoping to get to plant 100 larger trees like the one planted here today.”
The tree planted on Friday, a Swamp White Oak, was placed in front of the Menomonie High School, as the city and members of the Urban Forestry recognize and award local conservation efforts that have been conducted there.
Specifically, Nate McMahon, Menomonie High School environmental science teacher, and his students were awarded the annual Forest Friends Award while congregating in front of the school on Friday morning.
The award recognized a conservation and sustainability effort for McMahon and his students, as they started by removing an invasive species known as Buckthorn from the Galloway Creek in Menomonie.
“The following year, once the invasives were removed, we came back and planted the trees in that corridor. So, it was just a great opportunity for kids to get involved in a hands-on restoration-type project,” said McMahon. “We talk about that stuff in my environmental science classes, and this gave them the opportunity to actually live through this project and see it to completion.”
Through working on this project, he said he hopes that his students can better understand what they can do to continue helping the environment and staying involved in their community. Knowing what benefit trees have for their environment by keeping the local watershed clean can highlight the importance of what that commitment means.
As the award and Swamp White Oak planted in front of the school honors those efforts this year, McMahon said it is pretty special that both him and his students are appreciated for the hard work they have done.
“It’s a great reminder of the importance of Arbor Day and what it stands for,” said McMahon, speaking to the planting of their tree in their The fact that it is in front of our school will just remind students when they come back and visit their high school someday that they were a part of this project.”
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