What are non-linear maintained areas?

[urban forestry planner]

Page 210 of the manual is the "PRE-Storm Field Data Collection Sheet (Non-linear Maintained Areas)." Anyone know what a "Non-linear Maintained Area" is in this context?
Thanks.

[StormyJerry]

The intent of the four versions of Form 5 (post-storm data collection) is to cover the categories of community forests that result from two questions:

• Are the trees lined up along a road (linear), or are they scattered in an area (non-linear)?
• Are the trees maintained or not?

Combining all possibilities gives the following scheme:

• Along a road and maintained (Form 5A)--e.g. urban street
• Along a road and not maintained (Form 5B)--e.g., rural road
• Not along a road and maintained (Form 5C)--e.g., picnic area
• Not along a road and not maintained (Form 5D)--e.g., more wild section of a park

Hope this helps.

[urban forestry planner]

Thanks for all the answers StormyJerry.

Regarding non-linear areas, aren't we still just surveying the ROW + 50 feet back? We're not surveying our whole park are we?

When it is city land, the 50 feet back in a maintained area, are we asking the state to reimburse tree removal and pruning there in addition to the ROW tree removal and pruning?

[StormyJerry]

1) It depends on what you are responsible for. For an entire maintained park, you need to estimate the pruning, removal and debris costs for the total area. The only practical way to do that is to sample it. In the original Protocol, posted on the i-Tree website:

http://www.itreetools.org/resource_lear ... otocol.pdf

a procedure for sampling such areas is laid out, but you can set up your own as long as it is truly random. If the damage is pretty uniform, a small number of samples could give you a pretty good estimate.

2) You have to use the approach that best fits the local situation. In a maintained park, for instance, you would not use the linear approach even along roads, I suppose, since you have to remove all debris. In such a case, you would use the non-linear maintained method. If it is a maintained road through an unmaintained area, on the other hand, you would probably use the rural road method, where no 50' ROW is involved because no homeowners are there to add debris that you could not estimate in advance.

In general, I can only guess at the appropriate answer for any particular situation, because the legal situation on the ground dictates the approach that can be justified to FEMA. Other i-Tree users on the Forum may have better responses based on their local situation and experience, and I hope they will chime in.

Hope this helps--thanks for thinking so hard about this and making everybody else's job easier in the future!