Baton Rouge Green was founded to assist the Greater Baton Rouge community to better understand, preserve, plant, and maintain trees and forests as an important community resource. We work toward inspiring citizens, local officials, foresters, landscape architects, engineers, and planners to shift their focus to recognizing the importance of trees and other vegetation for improving our community and restoring our natural areas.
Building upon a model urban forest concept adapted from the Georgia Forestry Commission, Baton Rouge Green works with the community to enlarge and improve its urban forest by expanding the forest canopy to obtain the economic, ecological, and social benefits of trees by following six principles:
- Preserve existing trees and forests where possible.
- Increase space for tree planting to provide adequate soil volume for optimum growth.
- Preserve and improve the quality of the tree-growing environment through ongoing regenerative maintenance of the soil structure.
- Select trees for diversity and suitability that are native to our region and adapted to its soils.
- Select efficient planting locations.
- Work with the urban forest as a continuous resource regardless of ownership boundaries.
Simply explained, the model urban forest is based on the need to re-examine current development attitudes. It attempts to place trees at the same level of importance as other crucial infrastructure elements like roads and utility lines. To do this, we strive to set a collective new vision that includes new attitudes about trees in our capital city.
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