Photo by eschweik

It’s the last Friday in April. Happy Arbor Day! In commemoration of dendrophiles’ favorite day of the year, the District received its latest report card on how it measures up as a steward of the local tree canopy, and the results are a little disappointing. In fact, they’re incomplete.

The annual Tree Report Card, issued by Casey Trees, a nonprofit that works on restoring the city’s tree canopy—that is, the area of land that is sheltered by trees—states that while D.C. is doing OK on arboreal health and exceptionally well when it comes to planting new trees, our efforts in protecting trees is too inadequate to accurately judge.

And that’s a metric on which the District has come up short in the past. Casey Trees says that while the 2002 Urban Forest Preservation Act is a “good law,” it has not measured up to its promise of stabilizing the the city’s tree population thereby making it possible to reach the goal of increasing the citywide tree canopy to 40 percent by 2035. In previous years, Casey Trees gave D.C. an outright failing grade in tree protection after the District neglected to track tree mortality and transfered money from tree funding to cover budget shortfalls.

But for 2011, Casey Trees says the incomplete mark could change if the D.C. Council passes Phil Mendelson’s (D-At Large) Urban Forestry Administration Reorganization Act, which would transfer control over the Tree Fund from the District Department of Transportation to the Department of Environment.

On the bright—or, in this case, shall we say, shady—side, the District was awarded an A+ for its tree-planting effort, with more than 13,000 specimens being planted by federal and local authorities and volunteer organizations. If that seems like a lot for a densely populated city, Casey Trees says that D.C. has a surprising capacity to be a more verdant place:

While the District is a dense urban environment, plantable space is plentiful. The plantable area map above highlights the percent of land in each of the city’s wards that
can potentially accommodate trees.

Ward 3 has the largest canopy coverage, coming in at 57 percent, followed by Ward 4 at 49 percent. Citywide, the tree canopy remains at about 35 percent, with Ward 6 trailing behind at 17 percent. In terms of areas that are still plantable, Ward 8 leads the way with 30 percent, while Ward 1 comes in last at 14 percent.