THUNDER BAY — The City of Thunder Bay is currently working at hiring a new urban forester, according to the city’s manager of parks and open spaces.
“We're still working through the recruitment on that, so it's vacant at this time,” said parks manager Cory Halvorsen. “(We’re) actively working on that recruitment process and looking forward to finishing that off over the next few weeks.” Halvorsen added the city’s other forestry positions are filled, including a forestry technician, operational supervisor, and a number of arborists.
The city’s previous urban forester, Daniel Corbett, publicly resigned in 2024, due to what he called “mismanagement” of the urban forest strategy.
The current urban forestry management plan dates back to 2011 and it made over 20 key recommendations — and over 140 recommendations in total — for how to better manage the city’s trees and shrubs. They include diversifying the tree canopy, establishing routine maintenance cycles, bettering budget planning and tracking, strengthening tree protection bylaws, investing in new technology, and increasing public education initiatives. It also called for the city to be prepared for the emerald ash borer which would arrive in the city in 2016.
One of the new forester’s key objectives will be drafting a new plan to be presented to city council for adoption, Halvorsen said, adding that much of the existing 2011 document is still relevant today, so it will be more of an update, rather than a complete overhaul.
“The initial reviews of that were ongoing for the last couple of years,” Halvorsen said. “The document has been out for some time now and is due for an update.” The existing plan called for its own update in 2022, and while that didn’t happen, the emergence of the emerald ash borer, and the drafting of a specific plan to combat it, has guided a lot of the city’s efforts since, Halvorsen said.
“It's not a complete new approach that we're going to be bringing forward,” he said of an updated management plan.
Staying on top of urban forest management is crucial, said coun. Andrew Foulds, who, until recently, was the longtime chair of Thunder Bay’s EarthCare committee.
A healthy urban forest has numerous benefits, he added, including allowing for more carbon sequestering (and consequently, helping the city’s goal of becoming a net-zero producer of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050), beautifying the city and increasing property values (not to mention providing windbreaks and natural cooling for homes), bettering biodiversity, thus making the urban canopy more resilient to blight and invasive species, and providing more evenly-distributed shade, reducing “heat islands”, which effectively are concentrated area of higher temperatures within a city.
Foulds added that it’s important for the public to think about trees as we do roads or other infrastructure: assets which require constant upkeep.
“We need to be more thoughtful and we need to be more strategic, and we need to put resources into that to make sure that trees last more than 40 or 50 years,” he said.
Aside from drafting up a new management plan, Halvorsen said that other top priorities for urban forestry include continuing to manage the emerald ash borer (both by removing infected ash trees and replacing them with other species, as well as treating a set number of existing ones with an insecticide), and following through on proactive maintenance and increasing the number of planted trees.
“Every year we do have — whether it's through impacts from EAB or just the natural cycle of the trees — we have a certain amount of loss each year that we offset through the annual tree plant,” Halvorsen said.
