These are responses to a recent question on SCUP’s LinkedIn group. You may want to contribute to it?

The question: “Can someone recommend good master planning precedents for campuses that are more wooded, where the traditional collegiate green is not the best answer? I have looked at Wellesley, Mills, UC Santa Cruz and Woods Hole Quissett Campus. Surely there are others?” And some of the responses already:

• Neither Indiana or Kansas have traditional collegiate greens, and both have wooded areas.
• JCU and Griffith in Australia are good examples too (not woods but more jungle like - same theory can be applied though)
• I would look at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley. Both have significant wooded areas on their campuses as part of the overall campus master plan. Here at Wisconsin, about a third (300 acres) of our main campus is within what we call the "Lakeshore Nature Preserve" which is mostly wooded as well. We have a master plan for the latter to manage vegetation and cultural resources along with academic research and outreach activities.
• Lewis & Clark College outside Portland, OR certainly comes to mind.
• You might also want to look at the master planned development of the UC Santa Cruz campus, set on a hill in a Redwood forest overlooking the city and ocean beyond. It was initially planned in 1964 and has undergone more recent planning updates. There are some very distinctive elements in their development guidelines. The campus architect Emeritus. Frank Zwart, FAIA, might be able to help you.
• Smith College. Arboretum master plan by Towers Golde.
• Swarthmore is largely arboretum. Guilford College in North Carolina has a tree filled center and large forested area.

Consider visiting and contributing to SCUP's LinkedIn discussion about if and how college and university campuses may be inventorying and valuing their trees, and how integrated that is to master planning and overall planning work. We're looking for people to share current best practices.

It turns out that a campus tree has more value, and more kinds of value, than most people would think. A 2006 study of the value of New York City's tree inventory is one of a number of such studies, reflecting a growing number of institutional entities which consider trees to have both capital and operational value. If your campus is planning in an integrated way, in fact, it makes good sense to understand your tree inventory and its value to the institution.

• The article linked-to here, mentions i-Tree, a free software suite that lets people managing tree inventories to do so while taking many important variables into account.
• If you have an interest in campus heritage landscapes, you should visit SCUP's Campus Heritage Planning Network where, among other resources, there are several reports on campus-wide heritage landscape planning.

Trees provide solar reflection for energy savings, clean air pollutants, and intercept water to reduce stress on storm water runoff. New York figured that measuring the value of its 600,000 trees in this way results in a savings for the city of nearly $120 per tree, annually. Figure in aesthetics and things like property value, public health (visible trees reduce the length of hospital stays), stress, and so forth, and another $90 per tree per year in value brings the total to $210 per tree.

In New York City, that is a total of $122M in benefits from a department of the city that spends less than $15M on trees and forestry staff, resulting in an annual net positive value to the city of more than $100M, from urban trees.