What we do for your trees and the urban forest

At Los Verdes Arborists we specialize in providing solutions to tree trimming, pruning or removal problems in the urban forest. None of the tree waste that we generate goes to the landfill. It is either turned into chips that are used as mulch on landscapes, milled into usable lumber or used as firewood.

While trees provide beauty and value to the urban landscape, like any living thing, trees have a lifecycle. Over-mature trees commonly become a hazard and need to be removed to make way for young trees to be replanted or development to take place.

Often, young trees are planted without good long-term planning. Several decades later they may have become inappropriate to the site. Sometimes their structures can be suitably modified to fit the site but at other times they need to be removed. Using specialized skills and equipment, our expert staff can efficiently and safely modify the structure where feasible or remove any tree that needs to come out.

In the interest of reducing long-term maintenance costs and future hazards to properties with newly planted trees, it is beneficial to guide the structures of trees through the first ten years. Doing this can save tens of thousands of dollars by circumventing major structural modifications to mature trees. We can guide young trees through the first ten years, producing mature tree structures that are safer and require less maintenance over their lifetimes.

In cases where trees are damaged by weather or are producing high volumes of woody debris, we can clean and/or reduce the crowns to solve the problem. We have the capacity to process a high volume of woody material and get it off the site quickly, as well as the expertise to get it out of the trees without damaging property or posing a threat to residents.

Fuel Reduction And Defensible Space
The places where communities border wild lands is called the Urban Interface. The risk of damage to property by wildfire can be reduced at the Urban Interface by thinning out trees and brush before wildfires occur, or simply by rearranging the fuel structures in the forest.

While the simple spread of fire presents a hazard, low level fires that creep through the under story aren't generally the type of fires that cause major destruction. They are easily controlled and do not generate the type of heat that can destroy a home in spite of established defensible space. Firestorms that occur because of favorable fuel structures are what destroy neighborhoods and are difficult to control.

What Is A Fuel Structure?
Many of us learned how to build a camp fire in a Scout Program as kids. The fuel for the fire was arranged with the fine tinder piled directly under a symmetrical stack of sticks that got larger toward the top of the stack. The sticks crossed one another in such a way that air could freely flow between all of them, vertical air flow being the key goal. As the tinder began to burn, its flame heated the sticks above it causing a progressively taller, hotter flame that very quickly became hot enough to engulf the largest sticks on the top of the pile. With the fuel properly structured, it is easy to start a lively campfire with a single match.

On the other hand, if the structure is haphazardly constructed so that vertical air flow is poor and the smaller tinder isn't positioned in the right proximity to slightly larger bits of fuel, it is much more difficult to get a cheerful fire burning.

Removing Flammable Material Versus Compromising Its Structure
While removing extra fuels is the optimum way to reduce the hazard of fire in the short run, it has drawbacks and is not the only way to reduce forest flammability. One drawback to removing the fuels is that it robs the forest floor of the decomposing matter that nourishes plants and trees and helps to retain moisture. In the long run this arguably makes a forest more fire prone by making trees more susceptible to pathogen attack. Another drawback is that removing fuels is labor and machine intensive, making it expensive.

An alternative to removing the fuels is to do what is referred to as a "Lop And Scatter" operation. The goal of this type of operation is to reduce the vertical airflow through the fuels by lopping it close to the ground where it decomposes quickly.

A variation on this theme is to gather the fuel into small piles that can be accessed with a chipper and broadcast the chipped fuel over the site.

Whether the prescription is to remove fuels, Lop and Scatter or broadcast chips, we can help reduce the hazard of fire damage to property at the urban interface.