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Trees/Urban Forestry
The Parks and Community Services Department manages the City's trees and urban forest. Trees provide so many benefits for the Watsonville community! They clean our air, provide shade and cooling, improve stormwater and water quality in our wetlands, make our streets and trails more enjoyable to walk and ride bicycles, increase property values, and capture atmospheric carbon which helps address global climate change.
Unfortunately there are many streets, sidewalks, parks, and neighborhoods that lack trees. Watsonville’s Urban Greening Plan, adopted by the City of Watsonville in 2012, called for an additional 40,000 trees to increase City’s currently very low tree canopy cover of 7.8%. This page summarizes the City's efforts to rise to this challenge.
Learn about our Progress
In order to rise to this challenge, Watsonville Wetlands Watch and the City of Watsonville, with the help of many local partners and community volunteers have begun to plant trees throughout the City.
In 2017 the City and Watsonville Wetlands Watch partnered together to receive a grant from the California Department of Fire and Forestry and the California Climate Investment Program to expand the tree planting effort. This project planted an additional 300 trees on streets and parks.
Please visit watsonvillecommunityforest.org for more information and how to get involved.
The Watsonville Community Forestry Project
In 2020, in partnership with Watsonville Wetlands Watch, the City was awarded a grant from Cal Fire for the Watsonville Community Forestry Project. This project developed and implemented comprehensive urban forest management activities designed to evaluate current urban forest resources, identify locations, opportunities, and needs for urban forest expansion activities, develop appropriate policies to sustain and enhance urban forest resources within the City of Watsonville over time, and implement urban forest expansion activities in a way that advances these efforts.
This project is consistent with past planning efforts such as the Urban Greening Plan (2012) and the newly adopted 2030 Climate Action Plan (2021).
Resources
Urban Forest Management Plan - Adopted by the Watsonville City Council on April 23, 2024