Training Volunteers to Prune Recently Planted, Small Street Trees

Abstract Background Trees in towns and cities provide many benefits, but also disservices such as risk and conflicts. Structural pruning of young trees can reduce future conflicts and risk as trees grow larger; it also can reduce future maintenance costs. Volunteers can perform important urban forestry tasks such as planting, watering, and conducting inventories. It was hypothesized that, with training, they could also learn to structurally prune young street trees. Methods Forty-seven volunteers in three cities in Massachusetts were trained to structurally prune trees. Twenty volunteers trained in a classroom lecture; twenty-seven trained with a hands-on approach. The volunteers’ performance was evaluated with a written exam and in situ assessments of their ability to specify and explain pruning recommendations and make pruning cuts. Training type and covariates (e.g., volunteers’ familiarity with trees, number of branches) influence on volunteers’ performance were investigated. Results On the assessment of volunteers’ ability to explain pruning recommendations, volunteers who received hands-on training achieved higher mean scores (79%) than volunteers who received classroom training (74%). All volunteers who received hands-on training did not leave a stub when making a reduction cut, but only 70% of volunteers who received classroom training did not leave a stub. Volunteers who received classroom training achieved higher scores on the exam (93%) than volunteers who received hands-on training (85%). Conclusions Results suggest that with minimal training volunteers successfully learned structural pruning. This is an encouraging finding that may help municipal arborists accomplish more with limited urban forestry budgets.