University News

WIU Designated Tree Campus USA

March 6, 2015

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MACOMB, IL - For the third consecutive year, Western Illinois University has been designated a Tree Campus USA by the Arbor Day Foundation. The national Tree Campus USA program was created in 2008 to honor colleges and universities for effective campus forest management and for engaging staff and students in conservation goals. Toyota helped launch the program and continues its financial support.

According to Tree Campus USA, Western continues to achieve the title by meeting the organization's five standards: maintaining a tree advisory committee, having a campus tree care plan, dedicating annual expenditures toward trees, hosting an Arbor Day observance and sponsoring student service-learning projects.

Western's landscape maintenance department, within facilities management, maintains more than nearly 2,700 trees on the Macomb campus. Each fall, as part of the We Care event, Western's volunteer campus beautification program, trees are planted and/or mulching is completed around existing trees, and each spring, as part of Arbor Day, Forestry Instructor Paul Blome and WIU urban forestry management students lead tree plantings with elementary schools in western Illinois, a tradition that was started in 1993 by WIU Forestry Professor Tom Green. In addition, each spring semester, two trees are planted on WIU's Macomb campus to honor WIU employees and students who have passed away. A complete WIU tree inventory can be found at http://gis.wiu.edu/flexviewers/wiu_tree.

"We are so pleased to continue to receive the Tree Campus USA designation. We have such a beautiful campus and our landscape maintenance staff and our volunteers work hard to maintain our campus' natural landscape," said Julie DeWeese, vice president for administrative services.

According to WIU English Professor Emeritus and Historian John Hallwas, the WIU campus was designed by landscape architect Thomas Hawkes of Chicago, and in 1903-1905 noted horticulturalist John Van Ness Standish selected and supervised the planting of approximately 500 trees.

The Arbor Day Foundation and Toyota have helped campuses throughout the country plant hundreds of thousands of trees, and Tree Campus USA colleges and universities invested $23 million in campus forest management last year. More information about the program is available at arborday.org/TreeCampusUSA.

Posted By: University Communications (U-Communications@wiu.edu)
Office of University Communications & Marketing