Presentation to Brule River Preservation Alliance

Bio
Louise Levy earned a Masters Degree in Forest Science from Oregon State University and worked in the field of traditional forestry. After a little over a decade she was unexpectedly bitten by the arboriculture bug and made the lateral move into arboriculture and urban forestry. She became a UMN Tree Care Advocate (modeled after the Master Gardener program) before earning her Certified Arborist credential from the International Society of Arboriculture. Since 2011 she has run Levy Tree Care serving NE Minnesota and NW Wisconsin. Her skills and interests fill a niche as an arborist with forestry and forest ecology knowledge and training. Straddling those worlds is fun and challenging and keeps Louise in contact with current forest ecology research activities, including climate change projections for forests in northern Wisconsin.

Presentation
When caring for our forests (what we own, or regularly visit) our eyes, and often our hearts, along with our relatively short lives compared to the lives of trees, can lead us in a direction that is not necessarily the best for the long-term health, vigor and resiliency of the land and water we love. Add to that what we have learned about forest dynamics in recent decades can be out of synch with popular wisdom and historical understanding of what activities are best to care for our northern Great Lakes forests. Louise will present some perspective on understanding and caring for the forests along the Brule River and use a field trip to nearby properties to illustrate what she will describe.