Jersey City’s Urban Forest

Jersey City is losing about 124 trees per year due to multiple causes, like natural disasters, lack of diverse species causing the spread of disease, poor planting, and maintenance.According to the recent Tree Canopy Study commissioned by the Jersey City Environmental Commission, Jersey City has only a 17% tree canopy when a city this size should have more like 44%.The graphs above illustrate the tree canopy coverage by Ward, which is skewed due to the large parks like Lincoln Park in Ward C, Liberty State Park in Ward F and Arlington Park in Ward B. As you can see from the “third map”, Jersey City is extremely lacking in greenery. This is a depiction of how few trees Jersey City actually has. Planting 5,000 new trees and maintaining the existing ones is vital to Jersey City http://www.gicinc.org/PDFs/Jersey_City_Report.pdf.) One of the biggest reasons for planting trees is to help lessen the effects of flooding throughout the City. Currently, the 17% tree canopy is only stopping less than ⅓ of the amount of rainwater that hits Jersey City during a 1-inch rain event. The rest of that water is flooding the sewer systems and streets of our beloved City. This tree planting initiative will be able to increase the rainwater absorption rate to almost half! The City trees can absorb about 265 Olympic sized swimming pools of water! However, we can’t plant trees without knowing exact locations of empty tree pits, sick or dead trees, the wrong species of

However, we can’t plant trees without knowing exact locations of empty tree pits, sick or dead trees, the wrong species of trees due to the location of power lines, size of tree pit or habitat for certain types of rodents and bugs.