Subscribe to Pioneering Spirit
>200 subscribers
Share Dialog
Melbourne, Australia, offers a civic parable: a city working to double its urban tree canopy to preemptively adapt to extreme heat. They didn’t just plant more trees—they redesigned their protocols: how they identified, protected, and stewarded urban forests.
The city assigned every tree in the municipality a unique ID number and email address. The idea was simple: residents could report damage or health concerns directly to the city by emailing the tree’s unique address — essentially a practical maintenance tool.
And they did so through visionary municipal leadership, supported by policy integration, data systems, and public affection. Their 2012 Urban Forest Strategy aimed to increase canopy from 22% to 40% by 2040, reduce urban heat, increase biodiversity, and build long-term civic stewardship.
In La Crescenta, as in so many places, the crisis is quiet but cumulative. Our canopies are thinning. The summer heat is rising. And the old oaks are dying faster than we are planting.
La Crescenta—like all of Southern California—is governed not by a single visionary city, but by a tangled patchwork quilt of diffuse municipal institutions: water districts, arcane authorities, city councils, and county regulations. Yet this fragmentation opens space for bottom-up innovation. What Melbourne achieved with central vision, we can achieve through distributed protocol.
But to do that, we need more than a campaign. We need a nurturing infrastructure:
Care pathways.
Citizen science.
Open maps.
And protocols, so the work may be done again and again—and improved.
As defined by the Summer of Protocols, a protocol is "a shared sequence of rules or behaviors for achieving a desired outcome." It’s not just an app or a plan—it’s a way of organizing collaboration and creating patterns others can build on.
This is a
Share Dialog
Melbourne, Australia, offers a civic parable: a city working to double its urban tree canopy to preemptively adapt to extreme heat. They didn’t just plant more trees—they redesigned their protocols: how they identified, protected, and stewarded urban forests.
The city assigned every tree in the municipality a unique ID number and email address. The idea was simple: residents could report damage or health concerns directly to the city by emailing the tree’s unique address — essentially a practical maintenance tool.
And they did so through visionary municipal leadership, supported by policy integration, data systems, and public affection. Their 2012 Urban Forest Strategy aimed to increase canopy from 22% to 40% by 2040, reduce urban heat, increase biodiversity, and build long-term civic stewardship.
In La Crescenta, as in so many places, the crisis is quiet but cumulative. Our canopies are thinning. The summer heat is rising. And the old oaks are dying faster than we are planting.
La Crescenta—like all of Southern California—is governed not by a single visionary city, but by a tangled patchwork quilt of diffuse municipal institutions: water districts, arcane authorities, city councils, and county regulations. Yet this fragmentation opens space for bottom-up innovation. What Melbourne achieved with central vision, we can achieve through distributed protocol.
But to do that, we need more than a campaign. We need a nurturing infrastructure:
Care pathways.
Citizen science.
Open maps.
And protocols, so the work may be done again and again—and improved.
As defined by the Summer of Protocols, a protocol is "a shared sequence of rules or behaviors for achieving a desired outcome." It’s not just an app or a plan—it’s a way of organizing collaboration and creating patterns others can build on.
This is a
A protocol to identify, nurture, relocate, and monitor young oak trees (and other climate-resilient natives) that sprout in places where they cannot grow to maturity—so they can be moved to where they can live for generations.
Start by knowing your trees—as Melbourne did with its full tree census. Identify young oaks growing by sidewalks, fences, utility lines, or parkways that won’t support long-term growth.
Use tools like iNaturalist or develop a community-based tree spotting form.
Log trees in an Oak Relay Registry, with basic metadata: species, estimated age, GPS, surrounding constraints.
Overlay this data with LA County’s GIS Portal: heat islands, zoning, park space, and walkability maps to identify at-risk and high-opportunity zones.
Key insight: We need new, open, high-resolution canopy data. Satellite snapshots are not enough. This is where citizen science becomes protocol—every local observer a sensor.
Create a decentralized nursery network. Many of these young trees don’t need to be moved immediately—they need time, care, and documentation.
Invite residents, scout troops, schools, and churches to become Tree Stewards.
Equip each tree with a Tree Passport: logging its growth, health, and timeline for relocation.
Provide simple arborist training on watering, pruning, and transplant prep.
This is not a formal program. It’s a voluntary choreography of care, embedded in neighborhoods. Tree stewardship becomes an act of belonging.
When a tree reaches a certain age and size (~3–5 years), move it to a site where it can thrive. The goal is not just survival, but long-term integration into the urban forest.
Pre-map receiving zones: parks, medians, schools, creek corridors, water agency parcels.
Use climate data to guide species-site matching, and avoid monocultures. (Melbourne’s target: no more than 5% of any species, 10% of any genus.)
Integrate soil and water-sensitive design: permeable paving, stormwater harvesting, mulch basins.
The transplant process can be done with fanfare. Community Transplant Days celebrate the tree’s “second birth” and deepen neighborhood connection.
After relocation, the tree isn’t forgotten. It becomes a witness—to change, to care, to climate, to time.
Each transplanted tree retains its Tree ID and Passport, now updated with new coordinates and condition.
Invite students and artists to write to the tree, as Melburnians did with their "email a tree" program.
Include trees in public dashboards—not just for forestry professionals, but for everyone.
This is where the Internet of Trees takes root: a living mesh of data, affection, and stewardship. Trees are no longer passive infrastructure—they are public companions.
Start with data: Tree registries, canopy maps, vulnerability overlays.
Plan for diversity: Avoid monocultures; plant for projected climate, not nostalgia.
Engage the public: Every steward counts. Tree care is not a contract—it’s a culture.
Integrate design: Water and soil systems matter. Don’t plant what you can’t sustain.
Think long term: Triple the canopy in thirty years, not three.
This is v0.1. It is incomplete by design. A call to iteration. Much more work needs to be done to weave into existing administrative procedures and provide a seamless path to abstract away institutional complexity. The goal however is clear: a decentralized oak relay for the tangled civic fabric of Southern California. A root system with memory. The first roots of the Internet of Trees in LA.
See also:
The Refugio Protocol
A protocol to identify, nurture, relocate, and monitor young oak trees (and other climate-resilient natives) that sprout in places where they cannot grow to maturity—so they can be moved to where they can live for generations.
Start by knowing your trees—as Melbourne did with its full tree census. Identify young oaks growing by sidewalks, fences, utility lines, or parkways that won’t support long-term growth.
Use tools like iNaturalist or develop a community-based tree spotting form.
Log trees in an Oak Relay Registry, with basic metadata: species, estimated age, GPS, surrounding constraints.
Overlay this data with LA County’s GIS Portal: heat islands, zoning, park space, and walkability maps to identify at-risk and high-opportunity zones.
Key insight: We need new, open, high-resolution canopy data. Satellite snapshots are not enough. This is where citizen science becomes protocol—every local observer a sensor.
Create a decentralized nursery network. Many of these young trees don’t need to be moved immediately—they need time, care, and documentation.
Invite residents, scout troops, schools, and churches to become Tree Stewards.
Equip each tree with a Tree Passport: logging its growth, health, and timeline for relocation.
Provide simple arborist training on watering, pruning, and transplant prep.
This is not a formal program. It’s a voluntary choreography of care, embedded in neighborhoods. Tree stewardship becomes an act of belonging.
When a tree reaches a certain age and size (~3–5 years), move it to a site where it can thrive. The goal is not just survival, but long-term integration into the urban forest.
Pre-map receiving zones: parks, medians, schools, creek corridors, water agency parcels.
Use climate data to guide species-site matching, and avoid monocultures. (Melbourne’s target: no more than 5% of any species, 10% of any genus.)
Integrate soil and water-sensitive design: permeable paving, stormwater harvesting, mulch basins.
The transplant process can be done with fanfare. Community Transplant Days celebrate the tree’s “second birth” and deepen neighborhood connection.
After relocation, the tree isn’t forgotten. It becomes a witness—to change, to care, to climate, to time.
Each transplanted tree retains its Tree ID and Passport, now updated with new coordinates and condition.
Invite students and artists to write to the tree, as Melburnians did with their "email a tree" program.
Include trees in public dashboards—not just for forestry professionals, but for everyone.
This is where the Internet of Trees takes root: a living mesh of data, affection, and stewardship. Trees are no longer passive infrastructure—they are public companions.
Start with data: Tree registries, canopy maps, vulnerability overlays.
Plan for diversity: Avoid monocultures; plant for projected climate, not nostalgia.
Engage the public: Every steward counts. Tree care is not a contract—it’s a culture.
Integrate design: Water and soil systems matter. Don’t plant what you can’t sustain.
Think long term: Triple the canopy in thirty years, not three.
This is v0.1. It is incomplete by design. A call to iteration. Much more work needs to be done to weave into existing administrative procedures and provide a seamless path to abstract away institutional complexity. The goal however is clear: a decentralized oak relay for the tangled civic fabric of Southern California. A root system with memory. The first roots of the Internet of Trees in LA.
See also:
The Refugio Protocol
@patwater
@patwater
No comments yet