Tree survey in Bute Park and Arboretum
One of our ambitions in Branching Out is to make connections between the social and cultural values that people hold about trees, and physical characteristics of trees that we can measure and map.
To achieve that we have a program of aerial surveys (high resolution photography and other data collection onboard light aircraft) over the three partner cities Cardiff, Milton Keynes, and York. To validate the data collected in the aerial surveys we also have a program of in-situ (on the ground) tree surveying in small areas we have termed Urban Tree Observatories (UTOs).
In July I travelled to Cardiff to survey the trees in one of the UTOs, located in Bute Park.
Bute Park and Arboretum (Barc a Gardd Goed Bute) covers 53 hectares of green space alongside the River Taff and is known as the green heart of the city. It was formerly part of the grounds of Cardiff Castle, and was laid out from 1873 by Andrew Pettigrew, who was head gardener for the Third Marquess of Bute. In 1947 the park was presented to Cardiff Council, for the benefit of the people of Cardiff, and it is still owned and managed by the council today.
Over four days I surveyed around 90 trees. For each tree in the UTO, I recorded its location, species, diameter of the trunk, total height and height to the base of the crown, canopy spread in two directions, condition, life expectancy, and took photos of the tree, trunk, and leaves.
The park is home to numerous Champion Trees (trees which are the largest of their species in the country), as well as many rare and interesting species. A magnificent hybrid wingnut (Pterocarya x rehderiana) opposite the summerhouse café proved too large for my diameter measuring tape!
People are always keen to chat and ask what I’m doing while I’m surveying, and I had some great conversations with local people relaxing in the park, tourists walking through, and people who work in the park. It’s clear that Bute Park is special to a lot of people.
We have surveyed trees in the UTOs in York, Cardiff and Milton Keynes. Our next steps are to build digital maps of trees and their characteristics using the aerial imagery and other remote-sensed data across the three cities. We will use the UTO tree data to validate these newly-created spatial datasets, and we will link them to the social and cultural values we have discovered in the project. Ultimately we want to use our spatial data to build a tool to enable local authorities to start meaningful conversations with local people as part of managing and designing urban forests.
