Answers on the Tree Register
We put our questions to council officers about the City of Ballarat Exceptional Tree Register. Thanks to David Grant, Vegetation Planning and Management Officer who showed up and gave us these answers…
Hello BE Net,
The project (Exceptional Tree Register) is one of my main tasks currently along with the urban forest strategy work.
We have had 54 trees from Ballarat East nominated i.e. approx. 10%. This is the (official) locality of Ballarat East and I know your network is broader than just this specific area.
Question: When it will be open again?
Answer: The Register is open on an ongoing basis. This is not that clear on the website and needs to be updated. I will attend to that when I get back from Leave in April.
Question: What trees are on it?
Answer: No trees have yet been formally added to the Register although we do have some that have been voted to be on the Register. We are waiting until we have a few more assessed before making some type of formal announcement of the first batch of trees to go on the Register. We have another expert panel meeting scheduled for late April/early May so should have enough trees approved after that meeting.
Question: How the public responded to it initially?
Answer: There have been over 500 trees nominated which far exceeded our expectations. This has made the task of assessing a significantly bigger job than we had allowed for and hence part of the reason for the long delay in making our first formal announcement of the first batch of trees to be on the Register.
Question: How will the register continue?
Answer:
As mentioned above the Register is an ongoing project but until we have the 500+ trees all assessed or close to it we are reluctant to promote the Register or receive more nominations i.e. until we can respond to them in a timely manner. If you wish to nominate more trees now however I would still encourage you to do so but on the understanding we are still working on a large backlog of nominations.
More details here: http://www.ballarat.vic.gov.au/sh/trees-and-native-vegetation/exceptional-tree-register.aspx
David will follow up with BE Net about some of the data the city has on the urban forest in the Ballarat East area. Thanks so much David.
You can read about this tree on the BE Net. It’s titled ‘A Fabulous Tree’ and was published on Nov 3 2014.
And here is a link to it Pam: http://ballarateast.net/a-fabulous-tree/
Please contact David again at the council regarding its addition to the List.