Serrano Park Community This project is intended to improve the management techniques that are needed to successfully grow and maintain a healthy urban forest on limited resources. This urban forest belongs to the Serrano Park community. These are our assets and our responsibility.
Contracting out that responsibility just does not work. HOA’s are generally driven by cost and multiple bids on all projects. Each time a contractor is changed, the history data is lost and it is not possible to improve forest management without measuring the progress. The only way we can know if we are making progress is to be able to measure it, and the only way to do that is to remember that these are our assets the management is our responsibility. The contractors do the work, but it must be based on intelligent history and arboricolture based guidelines that support our community vision.
Project Goals:
- Develop a detailed plan for landscape management that is supported by the community.
- The plan must be sustainable with enough volunteers willing to help.
- The plan must establish the long term green belt vision supported by our community.
- The plan must have enough detail that the long-term community vision can be achieved while changing committee members and chairmen.
- Changes to the plan must be proposed by the Landscape Committee and approved by the HOA Board.
- The HOA MUST own its own forest history data.
- Set up the needed volunteer team to implement the plan.
- Promote transparency of the landscape management efforts.
- Educate the SP community about the landscape issues and our efforts at solutions.
There are quite a lot of books, publications, software, and guidelines, that address different issues of urban forest management, but none put it all together in a manageable way. We believe a complete management solution is possible and that once established, we think it can be taught and maintained by amateur volunteers.
The following is a rough outline of the project.
- Long Term Plan
- Vision, Guidelines, Budgets, and Reserves
- Area Themes – Community involvement
- Street Trees and Embankments, Paseo Sombra and Paseo Tranquilo
- Abeto Pool Carrotwood trees
- Abeto Street Trees
- Abeto Park
- Amapola Slopes
- Sendero Channel
- Sendero Entrance
- Lower Cypress Channel
- Middle Cypress Channel
- Upper Cypress Channel
- Trabuco Embankments
- Paseo Sombre Entrance
- Paseo Sombra Entrance Park
- Paseo Tranquilo Entrance
- Clubhouse area
- The main greenbelt needs to be divided up into smaller themes
- Management Tools
- Tree Inventory
- Inspections
- Work requests
- Updates from Work orders
- Updates Maintenance orders
- Updates from Planting orders
- Inventory maintenance updates
- Maintaining history on tree maintenance, issues, and growth.
- Punch Lists for tracking various projects and issues
- Mature Tree Maintenance schedules and issues
- Young tree Maintenance schedules and issues
- General Greenbelt Maintenance schedules and issues
- Drought planning
- Turf removal and water use reduction
- Work order tracking
- Other schedules and issues
- Best Practices Guides for consistency and improving practices
- Irrigation
- Tree selection
- Planting
- Staking
- Young Tree Maintenance
- Mature tree maintenance
- Inspection
- Root barriers
- Slope barriers
- V-Ditch maintenance
- Pruning plans
- Mortality management
- Drought management
- Turf use planning
- Area Theme Development Plans and Guidelines – Community guided
- Landscape Theme Pallet – Community guided
- Development Plan
- Budget and reserves
- Maintenance Plan
- Irrigation Plan
- Drought Plan
- Propagation Plan
- Reviews
- Inventory assessment
- Punch lists
- Best practices performance
- Theme progress
- Drought plan
- Irrigation efficiency
- Budget
- Reserve items periodic re-evaluation of life-expectancy estimates
- Non-Routine Projects
- Tree Inventory