The Park! The Trail! The Trees!

About 80 people enjoyed socializing, a "stand up dinner" of pizza and beer, and an informative set of presentations at Prospero's Uptown Books.

Chris DeLong and Brett Shoffner took us on a virtual stroll through Roanoke Park with discussions of the recent Tree Inventory, the new Trails and future efforts toward a better Roanoke Park and a better Kansas City. If you didn't make it you missed a good one. (March 26, 2013.)

Roanoke Park Tree Inventory Presentation on Scribd.com

Chris DeLong detailed the results of the Tree Inventory, showed how to play around with the online map: The Roanoke Park Tree Inventory on arcgis.com, giving one example of changing the symbols on the same underlying data to produce an Invasive Trees Heat Map. Chris highlighted the critical importance Native Trees have to our local ecosystem, with inspiration from Doug Tallamy's Bringing Nature Home.) Several attendees were inspired to plant some natives on their own properties and all wholeheartedly supported that direction for Roanoke Park.

Brett Shoffner showed evidence that Roanoke Park was serving as a model for ecological restoration and showed how trailbuilding was working to bring people together and get people out into underutilized parks. The neighbors of Rosedale Park and Kessler Park are following our lead! The sense of pride and protective "ownership" people felt for Roanoke Park was palpable in the room.

Over $2,000 was raised for the park with a big chunk of that coming from several generous park neighbors who offered up a challenge match to the event's attendees. Challenge taken and met! Thanks to these and other donations we can report that the Tree Inventory is completely paid off (woohoo!) and the Roanoke Park Conservancy will be directing funds toward the park in a variety of other ways including planting TREES.

 

See you in the Park!