Street Tree Management Plan

Street trees are an important asset through the City of Whittlesea, and provide many benefits to our community including:

• providing much needed shade in urban areas
• habitat for native wildlife
• contributing to neighbourhood character and positively impacting on streetscape amenity
• reducing air pollution in an efficient and cost-effective way

In 2019 we adopted our new street tree management plan, 'Greening Our Streets' which will guide us on how we will choose, plant, maintain, protect and value urban street trees over the next 10 years.

The plan includes:

• an assessment of the current state of our street trees
• Street Tree Management code
• information on how we manage tree risks
• information on our tree maintenance programs, including:
• clearance requirements for street tree pruning
• steps taken in tree root damage investigations
• how we manage pests and diseases
• how we deal with requests for tree services
• street tree protection requirements for developers
• a new street tree species list

Current state of street trees

In December 2015, we completed an inventory of our street trees - this includes the 79,624 street trees that come under our management.

• Each year we remove around 2,125 street trees because they are dead, dying or dangerous
• We also plant around 2,620 new street trees each year as part of our planting program
• Due to the large amount of growth in our municipality, we receive approximately 5,500 extra trees per year that were previously managed by developers
• 2 most common species of street trees in the City of Whittlesea are Wallangarra White Gum and Yellow Gum
• There are 275 remnant of protected street trees, most are indigenous River Red Gums
• 60% of our street trees are under 5m tall
• 87% of our street trees have a useful life expectancy over 41 years

Our key tasks

We have 6 key tree management functions:

1. Selection and planting - we undertake the planting of trees along streets and roadsides using the right tree, in the right place
2. Risk management - we assess trees located on our land and implement any works based on any hazards or risks identified
3. Maintenance programs - we implement both proactive and reactive tree maintenance programs to ensure that street trees are well managed
4. Protection - we protect all existing street trees within our municipality where possible
5. Removals - we will only remove trees that meet the tree removal criteria (you can view this by downloading a copy of the Street Tree Management Plan)
6. Value - we attribute a dollar value to street trees, charge appropriate cost recovery fees and acknowledge that their value appreciates over time