“Metuchen’s trees are largely past their peak maturity, and we are losing trees at an alarming rate,” Hart said as part of a presentation she gave at an Oct. 6, 2008 meeting of the Metuchen Borough Council. “Public works removed 73 trees [in 2007] and 31 so far in 2008. I believe there are 50-plus removals in their queue. In the next 10 to 20 years many or even most of our large trees will be gone.”

On February 2, 2009, the borough received a Community Stewardship Incentive Program (CSIP) grant from the state in the amount of $25,000 to help fund the first stage of a major study of Metuchen’s trees.

Using the money, Metuchen will begin a major initiative – the Community Forest Management Plan – to better preserve and maintain the borough’s trees. The first step of the plan is to create a sophisticated inventory of the existing trees in the borough, which may begin as early as spring 2009.

“A basic element in managing any asset is knowing what you have,” Hart said at the meeting. “The first major project we propose in our plan is a tree inventory, funded by a grant, to collect data on the age, size, and condition of all our street trees. An inventory will show us where we need trees most urgently.”

The inventory would show the relative age distribution of trees throughout the town and would help to determine where to plant trees most effectively.

“We don’t want to perpetuate the same situation we have now, where all the trees in one area are the same age,” she said. “Rather, we should be interplanting young trees among the older ones to maintain a healthy canopy as the mature trees decline.”

Hart said that the majority of the sycamores, oaks, and maples that line Metuchen’s streets were planted from the 1920s through the 1940s.

“That was 80 years ago, give or take a decade, and these urban trees are now well past their prime,” she said.

Creating an inventory of the species distribution of the borough’s trees will also help protect them from devastation by a single disease or pest.

“Although Metuchen has been fortunate so far and spared serious insect or disease problems such as the Asian long-horned beetle, there is evidence that some of our oaks are suffering from bacterial leaf scorch (BLS),” Hart said. “If it spread through all the oaks in our neighborhood, every [oak tree] can be destroyed in just a few years.”

BLS is a chronic disease that slowly results in an infected tree’s death by clogging its water transport system. There are currently no effective treatments or preventative measures, besides the removal of infected trees or the pruning of infected branches.

“We have a fiduciary responsibility on the tax side, but we also have the character of the town as another responsibility,” explained councilman Richard Dyas at the October 2008 meeting. “I think a big part of that is the look and feel of the town. People come here not only because Metuchen is a great community, and all the other aspects, the downtown, the schools… people come here for the trees.”