For their capstone project, a group of graduating seniors in Pomona College Professor Char Miller’s Environmental Analysis 190 class went out on a limb and sought to map all the public trees of Claremont, a suburb known for its arboreal beauty.
The result is a convenient online guide mapping more than 24,000 trees and serving as an educational resource for the community.
Ben Wise of the Tree Action Group of contacted the Environmental Analysis (EA) Program and proposed that a team use an existing inventory to create an online map of the city’s street trees.
Know trees personally
Wise’s aim was for people to see a tree out more about it, and “promote policies and actions that protect and develop this essential living resource for our city’s future,” he said.
So together, Class of 2015 seniors Alison Marks (Pomona College), Naomi Bosch (Pomona), Nadine Lafeber (Scripps) and Sydney Stephenson (Claremont McKenna),
with help from geographic information system (GIS) specialist Warren Roberts at Honnold/Mudd Library, developed a website and interactive GIS map, named Claremont Urban Arboretum, complete with information on many of the life histories of the species that line Claremont streets and whether they are native or exotic plants.
by a real client with a real problem that must be resolved by the end of the spring semester,” said Miller, director of the EA Program. The aim is to push students to synthesize all they’ve learned over four years and translate that knowledge into action, he said.
Miller said public awareness about trees is a live issue, especially these days.
Love and stony soil
“Claremont, the self-described City of Trees, has had a long love affair of the arboreal. But the current and crushing drought has made it essential that the community know more about the trees that are rooted into our stony soil,” he said.
Lafeber and Stephenson researched the trees and Lafeber worked on the website, which can be visited at https:// claremontsurbanarboretum.wordpress.com
Submitted by Sneha Abraham, Pomona College
