 So my name is Elise Shadler, I am the Program Manager of the Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Program. We are housed at the Vermont Department of Forest Parks and Recreation, but we're also a partnership with the University of Vermont Extension Service. So we basically provide technical, financial, and educational assistance to towns statewide. So we mostly work with all things related to public trees, which are the trees that are planted in public spaces, like the right-of-way or on public parks, village greens, town forests. So we work with about 100 towns a year in some capacity. You know, Urban Forestry is as much about people as it is about trees. So there's, on the one side, having a degree in natural resource management, it's very tangible to be able to work with a tree, and to make sure people understand the biology of the tree, how it works, how it's interacting with its environment. Trees provide a lot of benefits, and we're just learning more and more and more about what they're doing for us in these populated places, like our urban areas. So that's fun, and then on the other side of it I really like working with people, and I really like being able to empower people to take charge of something like a tree, which is so tangible, and we do a lot of grants to municipalities, so working with towns to really think about how to manage their urban and community forests better is really engaging and fun work. I think people are, again, really starting to think about the role that they play in our built spaces, and our job is really to help town staff and volunteers foster those benefits. So I'd say in general they're treated well, but it's all about resources and capacity, and a lot of towns just don't have that capacity. It's a very young field, urban forestry, and it really wasn't even recognized as a freeze or a profession until like the 1990s. So it's very, there's a lot of room for growth and learning. So we're just doing some routine maintenance of the trees around here. We've got to keep them lifted for pedestrians walking and for cars and stuff going under them. We're getting ready on the sidewalks for the winter where the flowers come down, so we've got to lift everything up. So you can see some of these branches are drooping down a bit, so I'm just trying to cut. Keep it up, keep it nice and shaped, and then some of these guys back here are getting up in the crown of the tree and loosening things up, getting all the dead wood out of there. We have some honey locusts right here, they're really pretty. We also have a lot of lindens over here, which I find really pretty, classic scree trees, you know. I'm Andrew, this is my first year working with these guys. I'm still a student up at UVM studying forestry and horticulture, so I'm really pumped to have this job and be working for the city. Well, we can talk at Nazian about the benefits that trees in the environment and around houses provide, but we're trying to improve one knowledge about picking the right tree for the right space, for example. So the motto is plant the right tree the right way in the right place. So helping people have a better understanding of different species and what they can plant where. So for example, here we've got overhead wires, so we can't really plant anything that's going to get really big on that side of the road. There's also these underground utilities like our gas lines and our water pipes that we need to be aware of. We're also in a very confined soil space, so there's only about 7, 6, 7 feet wide of this green space to plant in. So really improving the knowledge about what tree might succeed here and how to foster the maintenance of that tree to live for a really long time. Because one of the things that we know is that if you plant a tree in the ground and it only lives about 8, 9 years or doesn't even get any bigger than this locus here, it's not going to be really providing the kind of benefits we want to see. Whereas if you have these large street trees that have mature canopy, they're providing an amazing amount of storm water, water quality, air quality, noise pollution, light pollution, tree equity. These words are providing all of these benefits. So we're trying to improve the knowledge around species as well as how to grow long-lived big trees. What is tree equity? Okay, so this is a new phrase that really just in the past couple months really has been starting to roll out. There's an organization called American Forest that just released this really powerful tool called a tree equity tool. And so they're basically looking at urban areas and relating the amount of tree canopy to other demographic and socioeconomic factors. So there's this process that happened in the early 1900s called redlining where they basically, bankers would decide where to give loans for home purchases or business purchases and draw these red lines on maps and basically categorize different neighborhoods as category A, B, C, or D. And now there's all this research looking at that historical practice which was stopped and it was outlawed in the 1970s. But historic, we can now see the ramifications of those neighborhoods that were ranked category D that were chosen to be because they were not predominantly white upper middle class. Those have far less tree canopy. So we're in a place now where we can say, okay, this historical procedure or process led us to a place now where we have much less trees that are providing much less benefits. So we can strategically think about identifying those areas and planting more trees in those places. It's a pretty powerful tool. You know, a lot of research around marginalized communities that have never really had trees on their blocks. It's just very, a lot of concrete and a lot of impervious surfaces that if a city were just to come in and just plant trees without interacting with the neighbors and like really making it an engaging process and fostering the trust to empower people to really have ownership over those trees, then they might not do as well. Oh, well, you know, I don't think I would teach anything about our program. We're really, we've got a great team. There's five of us. We work with, like I said, about 100 towns a year. We're with a lot of volunteers and people that are engaged in their towns. We also work with our county foresters. We work with other forestry professionals. So I would not change anything.