Bowie UTC is 46% - study used to pursue utility for costs of ecosystem service lost to vegetation management for reliability; Bowie, MD

Tree canopy gets green thumbs up
City planning additional plantings, may offer residents vouchers
by Rachael DeNale | Staff Writer

A recent study has found the City of Bowie has better tree coverage than officials had estimated.
In the meantime, the city has begun a forest management plan to help make the tree canopy even larger.
Roughly 46 percent of the land in the City of Bowie is covered by urban tree canopy, according to a report completed in May by the University of Vermont and commissioned by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources in conjunction with the City of Bowie.
The study, done in 2008, was carried out by the Spatial Analysis Laboratory of the University of Vermont's Rubenstein School of the Environment and Natural Resources in consultation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service Northern Research Station.
BGE utility clearing work, which is ongoing in Bowie and will remove about 15,000 trees to improve the city's electrical reliability, is expected to reduce the canopy by about 1 percent. The removal is concentrated in residential areas, where the canopy will be reduced by 20 percent. The study was completed before the work began.