It was hard not to notice the row of honey locust trees in front of Taro Hall being removed in October to make way for the $22-million expansion of Brock\u2019s Goodman School of Business.<\/p>\n
Less obvious, however, is the plan that had long been in place to replace them with even more new trees around campus.<\/p>\n
In the past two years about 155 new trees have been planted by the Brock grounds crew, an initiative that can be traced to\u00a0the construction of the Cairns Family Health and Biosciences Complex, said John Dick, Manager, Ground Services.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Cairns came along, we had to remove trees, but we planted way more trees than we removed,\u201d said Dick. \u201cThey haven\u2019t necessarily gone back in the same spot, but we\u2019re planting mostly native trees and placing them in locations where they will thrive well into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the challenges for Grounds Services is finding appropriate spots that will allow the trees to mature properly. Many areas have pipes and other obstructions that complicate the issue of digging and planting.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes you wonder why there\u2019s a spot that doesn\u2019t have trees, but there are a lot of underground services that prevent them being planted there,\u201d said Dick, who added that maintaining a balance with wide open areas on campus is also important.<\/p>\n
Another issue\u00a0crews have been dealing with for the past year or more is removal of dead or dying ash trees, as the relentless emerald ash borer insect continues to devastate those native hardwoods.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of Niagara is affected. There are some treatments but they\u2019ll only work for the short term. Most of (Brock\u2019s ash trees) are showing signs of having the insect. There are a number of young trees that haven\u2019t been affected yet, so the hope is they may outlive the insect,\u201d said Dick, adding that most of Brock\u2019s ash trees were fortunately not of significant size or age.<\/p>\n
As ash trees are removed, they\u2019re replaced with a wider variety of species.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe try to add tree species to keep our diversity going,\u201d said Dick, \u201cso that we don\u2019t have the same problem in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Shady business: When trees need to be taken down, Brock crews respond by planting even more new ones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":41993,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3319,4052,1],"tags":[594,4638,245,4639],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41992"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41992"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42364,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41992\/revisions\/42364"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}