Healthier Communities Through Healthy Trees

Our Community Forest Needs Your Help

Follow Penny, our "Tweeting" Tree!

Penny is a pin oak, one of the most popular deciduous tree species in the Midwest, living in Loose Park in Kansas City, Missouri. Her value to the city, measured in storm water reduction, improved air quality, higher real estate values, carbon storage, and energy savings (see more below) is $25,804 and growing!

Penny has many friends in Loose Park: Roy, another, very handsome, pin oak (and her secret heartthrob), Lewis, a grumpy scots pine, Percy, a Black walnut, and the newly planted Baby Walnuts. Penny also communicates via the wind with Tilly, the linden that stands outside of Bridging The Gap's offices. Suzy is one of Penny's best squirrel-friends and walked on Penny's behalf in Bridging The Gap's EarthWalk.

Find out what Penny is up to by clicking the Twitter icon to the right.

Want to visit Penny? Here's a map.

Tree Tags Show the Value of our Urban Forest

While driving around town, you may notice several prominant trees sporting large "price tags" with dollar values on them. The purpose of the tree price tag project in the Kansas City area is to make people aware of the many benefits that trees provide to cities in terms of stormwater reduction, improved air quality, higher real estate values (and property tax receipts), carbon storage, and energy savings. While trees are very beautiful, they are a vital part of the metro’s infrastructure, providing many benefits. They need maintenance and care. This is not a nice extra in city budgets; it is vital maintenance that actually saves cities money in the long run. Trees don't cost us money - trees pay us back many times over. The tree tags show a dollar value for the services provided by that tree over its projected lifetime.
READ MORE

The community forest is all around us. It’s made up of the trees in our yards, in our parks, along our streets, surrounding our public buildings, shading our parking lots, and growing along our streams.

Heartland Tree Alliance is your resource in the Kansas City region for information about trees, and ways to take action on behalf of our community trees. On these pages you’ll find all you need to get started, as well as links to some of the dozens of other sites about urban and community forestry that are also full of great information.

Our mission is to engage people of the greater Kansas City region to take action and advocate for a healthy community forest.

Read our TREE-News!

Tree Keepers Workshops: Volunteer Training for a Healthy Community Forest is a comprehensive training class where participants learn everything from tree identification and species selection to urban soils and diagnosing tree problems. For more information, click on the "Get Involved" tab at the left of your screen.

Heartland Tree Alliance is the winner of the 2009 Arbor Day Gold Leaf award given by the Midwestern Chapter of International Society of Arborists.