A position you may not have known existed in the city of Las Vegas is our urban forester. Brad Daseler oversees the 45,000 trees that the city owns and maintains.
We have plans to plant 60,000 more trees by the year 2050. Along with managing the existing trees, Brad and his team are constantly working toward this goal by growing, planting and replacing diseased trees around the city.
The below was shared by Kevin L. Stoker of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
As a maintenance worker at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Steven Glimp encountered a tree that “just didn’t look right.” He knew it was an oak, but it wasn’t like any other oak on campus.
Glimp learned that it was a hybrid oak, a cross between a Gambel (Quercus gambelii) and a Desert Scrub Oak (Quercus turbinella).
“The genus Quercus (oak) is notoriously promiscuous and will hybridize with other oaks,” said Glimp, now the Manager of the Parks and Grounds Maintenance Division of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs for the City of Las Vegas. “The Gambel oak is more tree like and when it hybridizes with the desert scrub oak, you get a very drought tolerant version of the oak with best qualities of both parent species.”
That’s the kind of resilience necessary for a tree to survive in an urban landscape dominated by asphalt and concrete. Since that first encounter, Glimp has found several more stands of hybrid oaks while hiking Red Rock Canyon, Mount Charleston, and other places in the desert Southwest. When he finds a hybrid with the right characteristics, such as a structurally sound trunk that can develop into a good form and colorful seasonal leaves, he adds it to the City’s inventory of trees. He’s now introduced 12 new varieties of hybrid oaks to the City’s urban canopy.
But it would take more than a hearty oak to solve the problems faced by Glimp when he was hired as the City’s first urban forester in 2016. At that time, the City’s urban trees were dying off at a rate faster than new trees could be planted.
“We were never going to catch up,” Glimp said. “They [city officials] knew they had a problem with keeping trees alive in the built environment; they just didn’t know what the solution was.”
Starting essentially from scratch, Glimp built an urban forestry program that serves as a model for other cities in the Southwest. He adopted best practices from across the Southwest and, introduced new, innovated approaches, and continues to grow the program in terms of funding and staff, including hiring Bradley Daseler, a municipal arborist and the City’s current Urban Forester.
Together, Glimp and Daseler have cultivated what may be the largest city-owned nursery west of the Rockies. Under their stewardship, the nursery has grown from a handful of trees to nearly 2,800 trees from 75 different species. More important, the nursery and other innovations have helped to dramatically reduce the mortality rate of newly planted trees. The fruits of their efforts are evident in the vibrant green downtown corridor along Main Street, 3rd Street, and Fremont Street.
“Our trees are a huge financial asset,” Glimp said. “We need to take care of them or we’re not being responsible stewards of that asset.”
It’s the type of responsibility Glimp embraces. He identifies as a “plant geek” and got into botany because the trees didn’t talk back to him. As a maintenance worker at UNLV, his fascination with plants sparked a lot of questions, so to find answers, he signed up for botany classes.
“The first taxonomy class I took, I began looking at floral structures of plants--that’s how you identify plants by their floral structures—and I became intrigued by just how amazing and adaptable this part of our world is,” Glimp said.
In particular, he was fascinated by the flowering, fruiting and hybridization of all the plants and trees. While pursuing a degree in Botany, Glimp worked for UNLV’s Landscape, Grounds, and Arboretum Department. In that role, he learned a lesson that has helped shape his career as an urban forester.
The department had received two Indian Rosewood trees to trial somewhere on campus.
“We were told that they were a tough tree, so we thought, ‘well, let’s see how tough you really are,’” Glimp said. “We planted them in probably the worst location you could put a tree.”
The trees found a home in the parking lot islands next to UNLV’s Barrick Museum. It was a severely compacted location completely surrounded by asphalt and had little to no irrigation. In spite of the location, the two Indian Rosewood trees survived and thrived.
“They’ve been hit by cars, and they’re still there,” he said. “I learned that if you put the right tree in the right spot and right location, it can thrive.”
That lesson has paid off in some of the City’s worst locations for trees, such as Brewery Row along Main Street where the mortality rate for trees in the downtown area was especially high. When faced with those tough conditions, Daseler said Glimp told him he “just happened to know a tree that worked.” The Indian Rosewood tree is native to India, Pakistan and other parts of Southeast Asia. Glimp’s team has also has had success with several native and non-native species that can withstand drought and high heat. They test and plant species of trees from this region and other arid regions of the world, including Australia, South America and North Africa.
“We would much rather them to all be native or regionally native to the Southwest, but with the need for diversity, all bets are off,” Glimp said. “We look for trees that can thrive here without a negative impact.”
Even if Glimp finds the right tree, it’s not enough to just plant that tree over and over again, an approach the City employed before Glimp and Daseler came along. The City would plant the same species of tree along an entire street, a practice that made the entire population of that species of trees vulnerable to insects or other defects. Ten years ago, Afghan Pines made up 70 percent of the Las Vegas Valley’s large, evergreen tree population. They are now being decimated by an insect with an insatiable appetite for that species of tree.
The most significant obstacle contributing to tree mortality was the amount of space set aside for trees along City streets. Prior to the creation of an urban forestry program, the space mandated for tree planting was a 5-by-5-foot cutout. At that size, however, the arable surface above ground and the permeable space below ground were inadequate for trees to develop a healthy root system. The trees essentially cooked in an overheated urban environment surrounded by unavailable compacted soil. Glimp and Daseler advocated an expansion of the minimum space to 5-by-8 feet, which almost doubled the arable space. They also urged the use of more technologically improved strategies of providing adequate available soil volume, those that did not require compacting the surrounding soil under sidewalks and thus constricting root growth.
These innovations--planting the right species, diversifying the types of trees and increasing the space for planting—have increased the resiliency of the City’s trees, but they failed to address one of the most significant causes of tree mortality—the long term health of commercial nursery trees.
“What you get with full-size trees from nurseries is a terrible root system,” Glimp said.
The longer commercial nursery trees grow in a small container, the more their roots tend to bunch up and intertwine. By the time trees grow to full size, their root systems struggle to develop when planted in small spaces. By growing trees in the City own nursery, Glimp and Daseler plant and replant the trees in larger containers, and through root pruning, remove many of the defects associated with commercial nursery trees.
“We don’t purchase trees from nurseries,” Glimp said. “The goal is to have all the trees locally propagated with our partner the Nevada Division of Forestry.”
By growing their own trees, Glimp and Daseler also have dramatically reduced the cost of planting trees. Specimen sized trees purchased from a nursery, Daseler said, cost the City $5,000 to $10,000 per tree. The same trees, with even better root systems, can be produced in the City’s nursery for $700 to $800 per tree.
“We also can try out different species,” Glimp said. “It allows us to grow more resilient full-size trees with healthy root systems.”
These innovative approaches have the potential of increasing the life expectancy of the City’s trees from 10 to 15 years to 50 and 60 years and beyond , depending on the species.
In the meantime, Glimp retains his fondness for the hybrid oak. The hybrid oaks may not be the biggest trees, reaching up to 30 feet in height, but they are among the toughest and most resilient. The promiscuous Gambel oak is typically found at an elevation of 6,000 feet while desert scrub oaks are more common in the elevations just above the Las Vegas valley. When they meet, magic happens.
“What’s really cool is that one deciduous Gambel that’s really leafy can hybridize with an evergreen shrubby desert scrub oak and produce a totally unique variety of oak,” he said.
It’s these kind of oaks that helped turn a maintenance worker into a plant geek who is pretty particular about where he hikes.
“If there are no trees there, there’s no reason for me to be hiking out there.”