TREE ORDINANCES CAN HELP LOWER ELECTRIC BILLS

 From Environment News Service: AmeriScan: July 6, 2000

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TREE ORDINANCES CAN HELP LOWER ELECTRIC BILLS

GAINESVILLE, Florida, July 6, 2000 (ENS) - Municipal ordinances are a good 
way to preserve urban tree canopies and lower city residents' summer 
electricity bills, a University of Florida (UF) study suggests. The study by 
UF geography researchers used a new method to compare the tree canopy in 
Gainesville, which has a strict tree ordinance, with nearby Ocala, which has 
a looser law. It concluded Gainesville's canopy is more than twice as thick 
as Ocala's - and that the canopy's added shade is the likely reason that 
Gainesville residents spend an average of $126 less than their Ocala 
counterparts for power bills each year. "This study justifies in economic 
terms the existence of a tree ordinance," said Michael Binford, a UF 
associate professor of geography. 

The study compared the tree canopies in both cities through satellite and 
land based observations combined with computer analysis. Where past studies 
tended to measure just the top surface of the canopy, the UF method measured 
the top leaf coverage as well as leaves beneath. To do that, researchers 
combined images of the cities' tree canopies from a satellite with ground 
based light measurements and analyzed the data with an "artificial neural 
network," an analytical computing technique that mimics the action of 
biological nerve systems. The analysis generated a number for the leaf area 
index, or square meters of leaves per square meter of ground, for each city. 
Gainesville's index was 4.61, while Ocala's was 2.13, meaning Gainesville has 
more than twice the leaf coverage of Ocala. Ryan Jensen, who did the study 
for his doctoral research, said a prominent reason for the difference is that 
Gainesville has far stricter rules than Ocala regarding tree removal. 
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