Introduction
Everett’s urban tree canopy has quite a story to tell you!
Simply scroll through the following pages and interactive maps for a visual depiction of tree canopy across the community. You can learn all about the strengths, benefits, opportunities, and challenges associated with caring for our city's urban forest.
The term “urban tree canopy” means all the trees in a city, including trees that are in parks, along sidewalks, and in your yard. The publicly and privately-owned forests combine to create an urban tree canopy that provides numerous benefits to city residents, businesses, students, and the Puget Sound region as a whole. Ensuring a healthy urban forest is a priority for the City of Everett, so to better understand how our trees are doing, we recently conducted an assessment. This included measuring how much tree canopy we have in the City, estimating the number of public street trees, and inventorying our park trees. This Story Map provides details on these initiatives and is organized into two sections, including:
- Forest Resources. This section will show you information about current urban forest conditions in Everett and the urban tree canopy data analyses and findings.
- Public Trees. This section will show you the distribution of public trees across the community. Warning, maps may take time to load.
What do We Have? Forest Resources
Benefits of the Urban Forest
Healthy urban forest benefits come from their significant contributions to stormwater management, public health improvement, energy use reduction, air pollution abatement, and overall quality of life. The ecosystem, economic, and social services provided by trees become even more important to Everett as the City grows and changes with time.
Click on the image below to explore these benefits in more detail.
Urban Tree Canopy
Canopy cover is a way of expressing, as a percentage, how much of any given area is shaded or protected by trees. Canopy cover is an important way of evaluating the specific location, density, and benefits of an urban forest.
An Urban Tree Canopy Assessment was performed in 2017 as part of the Parks Recreation and Open Space Plan development. The project found that 25.0% of Everett is covered by tree canopy, while 43.4% of the city is covered by impervious surfaces (e.g., roads, buildings) that repel stormwater and contribute to heat island effects. The remaining land in the city is pervious areas such as low-lying vegetation (22.1%), bare soil (5.2%), and open water (4.3%).
The analysis reveals that:
- Everett manages 2,563 acres of public property with 828 acres of tree canopy.
- Parks and open space in the city proper (excluding the Lake Chaplain Tract) are estimated at 920 acres and have a canopy cover of 38%, contributing to 3% of the city’s overall canopy cover.
- The theoretical maximum canopy for the city is 52% tree canopy. This assumes trees can be planted in all grass and low-lying vegetation areas, and in bare soil.
Everett’s canopy cover is in the lower range when compared to other communities in the Puget Sound region.
Everett has the potential to increase canopy cover. As the community progresses in setting tree canopy goals, “targets are best developed for specific cities and should consider constraints to creating canopy such as:
- Development densities (i.e., dense development patterns with more impervious surfaces have less opportunity for cover);
- Land use patterns (i.e., residential areas may have more opportunity for canopy than commercial areas, but canopy cover tends to be less in residential areas of disadvantaged communities versus wealthy ones);
- Ordinances (i.e., parking lot shade ordinances promote cover over some impervious areas); and
- Climate (i.e., canopy cover in desert cities is often less than tropical cities)(AmericanForests.org).”
You can explore how tree canopy varies across the city. Select the buttons in the following sections to activate new layers in the map and explore canopy cover.
How to Use These Maps
- Select the street map icon in the top-left corner of the map to help locate your street.
- Use the vertical bar on the right hand side of the page to view the legend and activate layers.
- Learn more by clicking on a colored shape on the map.
Public and Private Land
Most of Everett's tree canopy is on private lands:
- 82.7% on privately owned property (3,947 acres)
- 17.3% on publicly owned property (828 acres)
Overall, the level of canopy cover on City owned property is slightly higher than privately owned property (32.3% and 23.8% canopy cover, respectively).
Council Districts
Everett is broken into 5 Council Districts that vary in size and amount of tree canopy.
Parks
Everett Parks manages over 920 acres of parks and open space and 27 miles of regional trails and park paths. Everett Parks actively manages about 60 properties. Of these about 40 provide multipurpose active park use at Regional, Community, Neighborhood, Urban/Downtown, and Linear Parks. Remaining sites are Special Use, Natural Areas/Greenways, Garden/Gateways, or Unclassified parks predominantly for single purpose recreation or passive use.
These parks combined cover 350 acres of land with tree canopy cover (43%). By planting additional trees, the city could potentially increase the canopy with these areas to 78%.
Neighborhoods
There are 27 neighborhoods in Everett, combined they cover a total of 14,600 acres with a median canopy of 23%. Municipal Watershed and Valley View neighborhoods had the most canopy (74% and 57%, respectively) and Northeast and East By Northeast neighborhoods had the lowest canopy (4% each).
Land Use
The major land uses in Everett include residential, commercial, industrial, metro and resource lands. Residential land use covers the greatest area, at approximately half of the community (13,683 acres). Lands classified as Industrial have the greatest canopy cover.
Throughout the Puget Sound region, there are 29 areas identified for Regional Growth Centers. Regional Growth Centers are areas identified for future growth, economic development, and public transportation infrastructure, typically they occur in mixed use/industrial areas. For urban forest management, the regional growth center becomes a known area where tree canopy is highly likely to change within the context of development and construction. For more information visit this link: https://www.psrc.org/our-work/centers.
Click on the button below to see the location of Everett's Regional Growth Center
Urban Tree Canopy Benefits
Annually, Everett’s existing citywide tree canopy provides residents with $8.7 ± $0.4 million in benefits.
Everett’s trees are amazing, each year the City’s urban forest will:
- Remove 686 ± 34 tons of pollutants from the air (valued at $4.4 million ± $220,000).
- Intercept 152,000 ± 7,600 gallons of stormwater annually (valued at $1,358 ± $68).
- Sequester 25,050 ± 1,250 tons of carbon (valued at $4.3 million ± $214,000).
In addition to the annual benefits, the carbon stored by the current urban forest contributes an additional $107 ± $5 million in benefits, bringing the collective benefit amount to $115.7 ± $6 million*.
Because of the many benefits trees provide in stormwater management, the City of Everett has mapped the watershed sub-basins as a key approach to managing the local environment. Knowledge about the urban forest within these areas provides a benchmark for understanding and optimizing stormwater mitigation benefits and other environmental services.
*This information was calculated using models and methods derived from i-Tree Canopy (www.itreetools.org). Data is presented as the estimated value ± the standard error.
What do We Have? Public Trees
Street Trees
The City manages public trees, such as those in parks, along city streets, and at city facilities and parking lots.If a tree is in a public right of way in front of a house, it is the responsibility of the property owner.
Private property owners (residential and commercial) can request the installation of a free tree from the Everett Public Works Department. To find out more about the Everett Tree Planting Program please see the City's website.
As of 2023, there are approximately 29,000 street trees and 5,400 inventoried park trees. The City has data on the location of street trees and growing inventory of park trees. For more information on the park trees see the Park Tree Inventory & Resource Analysis Summary Report. A public tree inventory helps the City make informed management decisions, manage liabilities, and ensure proper care. It allows urban forestmanagers to assess the composition, structure, and distribution of public trees.
Park Trees
The public park tree inventory is characterized by the following:
- 5,400 trees.
- 112 different tree species.
- $82,323 in annual benefits to air quality and stormwater management (www.itreetools.org).
- Replacement value of $26.2 million.
To date, park trees have stored 4,163.4 tons of carbon (CO₂) in woody and foliar biomass. The top 3 species represent 49% of the park tree inventory.
Activate the park tree data to see where the park trees are located and learn more about the individual trees.
What Do We Want?
Managing for the Future Forest
A sustainable urban forest generally has trees of various ages and is diverse tree species well-suited to their site conditions, insect-and disease-resistant, and low maintenance. A tree population meeting these criteria is considered sustainable, resilient, and produces maximum social, economic, and ecological benefits for the community.
“We cannot separate sustainable urban forests from the people who live in and around them. Sustainable urban forests are not born, they are made. They do not arise at random, but result from a community-wide commitment to their creation and management. Obtaining the commitment of a broad community, of numerous constituencies, cannot be dictated or legislated. It must arise out of compromise and respect.”
--Clark, et. al., A Model of Urban Forest Sustainability
Everett has the potential to increase canopy cover (not accounting for future development). While it’s not realistic to plant trees on all available sites, there is room to grow. As canopy cover increases, so do the environmental and socioeconomic benefits to the community!
Everett has a prioritized planting plan that helps identify locations that would result in greater environmental and social benefits from the addition of a tree. When trees are planted in the right place, even small increases in canopy cover can have a large impact.
Overall, potential planting sites are prioritized as follows:
- 71 acres very high priority.
- 179 acres high priority.
- 396 acres moderate priority.
- 1,028 acres low priority.
- 2,480 acres very low priority.
Click the buttons below to look at prioritized tree placement into stormwater management strategies that would help capture and reduce runoff and for social equity that would better distribute the benefits of trees across the community.
If you have questions or suggestions for better managing and growing our city’s urban forest, please contact:
Kimberly Moore
Assistant Parks Director | Parks and Facilities
KMoore@everettwa.gov | 802 E. Mukilteo Blvd., Everett, WA 98203
everettwa.gov | Facebook | Twitter
Acknowledgements
Funds for this project were provided by the USDA Forest Service Urban and Community Forestry Program, administered through the State of Washington Department of Natural Resources Urban and Community Forestry Program. The USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer.
