A nice Earth Week milestone was reached at the Libro Credit Union Centre in Amherstburg Saturday morning. 1,000 trees have now been given out over five years through a partnership between the University of Windsor and the town. “This is our fifth year at the University of Windsor School Environment, where we’ve partnered up with the Town of Amherstburg to give out trees because one of the big things that we wanted to focus on was how do we start to build better tree canopy?” said Alice Grgicak-Mannion, a professor in the department. The goal goes beyond just planting trees. “Obviously climate change, but also for shade issues, and for mental health. It’s all these great things that trees provide to humans and to animals.” Students are also playing a big role, getting hands-on experience by interacting with residents and gaining knowledge through experiential learning. “What the students do then is they actually go back out to the properties. They tag the trees where they geo-locate them using spatial technologies so we have a full geodatabase of where all these trees are mapped, and we can track them as they grow over time,” said Grgicak-Mannion. Right now, canopy coverage in Windsor-Essex is sitting around eight percent, with a long-term goal of pushing that number higher. “The goal would be to get up to about 18 per cent over time so that’s one of their goals here,” she said.
