Pruning project underway to protect campus trees

You’ll probably notice a lot of tree pruning taking place on the North Campus over the next several months.

UB is contracting with a Clarence company to prune some 844 trees on the Amherst campus alone. Pruning on the South Campus will be done during a second phase.

It’s a first step toward a more comprehensive effort to protect and enhance the health and longevity of the trees across UB’s campuses, explains Daniel Seiders, a landscape architectural planner in Campus Planning.

“We know the campus will be curious when they start seeing crews with chainsaws,” Seiders says. “But they are not necessarily removing trees. In most cases, they are improving their health by pruning. It’s taking the assets that we have and optimizing their health and longevity.

“We’re moving in the direction of a healthier campus forest,” Seiders says.

Crews from AJ Tree Services will focus on pruning diseased limbs and branches that may affect the health of the entire tree or pose a safety hazard should they break and fall during a windstorm.

“The North Campus has a younger-age class of trees, so you have a lot of lower canopies and a lot of lower foliage that can be an obstruction for vehicles, pedestrians and groundskeepers,” says Steve Esler, an arborist with the tree service.  

“So, a lot of the pruning is kind of training trees to grow upward rather than outward, like a bush,” Esler says. “We’ll be doing a lot of that.”

Much of the pruning is scheduled between January and March, when trees are in their dormant stage. And while UB grounds crews have routinely pruned trees throughout the year, this project is different.

“This is different in that it’s on a larger scale,” Esler says, “Instead of dealing with one problem tree or just a few low-hanging branches, this is going to be a larger quantity.”

The pruning project is also part of a larger, comprehensive effort by Campus Planning to make more informed decisions about new plantings, understand the diversity of species on campus and protect the health of trees at UB so they can mature long into the future.

The effort began in earnest with a 2021 tree inventory that plotted the location, type, size and condition of more than 6,900 trees across the North and South campuses, says Sean Brodfuehrer, assistant director for Campus Planning.

The tree inventory provided a baseline to help planners and facilities crews make decisions about what to plant where in the future. It also flagged deferred maintenance on campus trees, much of which can be addressed through pruning.

“Part of the reason to do this inventory is to give the grounds crews better direction on where to plant and how to maintain UB’s trees,” Brodfuehrer says.

“For years, they would trim trees or they would plant trees, but they didn’t have a resource to go to for what kind of tree they should plant or where they should plant it,” he says. “This is a resource to say, ‘Here’s really how we need to invest in our trees moving forward to make it the campus we want.’”