What is Neighbourwoods©?
Neighbourwoods© is a community-based tree inventory, monitoring and stewardship planning program. Neighbourwoods is designed to help community groups and volunteers conduct an inventory of their urban forest and use that information to inform urban forest stewardship in their communities and neighbourhoods. Neighbourwoods is also an exciting way of being active, interacting with the people in your community and learning all about the trees in and around where you live
Neighbourwoods© was developed in 1995 by Dr. Danijela Puric-Mladenovic and Dr. W.A. Kenney from the University of Toronto and has been used in communities all over Ontario and beyond. We are so excited to add Long Branch to the list!
The Objectives of Neighbourwoods©
- To engage the public in urban forest stewardship, conservation, management and planning at the neighbourhood level;
- To ensure the collection of standardized and comprehensive data that can be used by tree professionals and non-professionals alike; and
- To inform individual tree and urban forest stewardship based on sophisticated tree analysis and advanced data interpretation.
Neighbourwoods© in Long Branch

We launched our Neighbourwoods© project in Long Branch in the summer of 2018, and hired three students for the summer to be trained by and to work with Dr. Puric-Mladenovic
In 2019, we decided to expand the project and hired five students.
Building on the data we gathered last summer, Dr. Puric-Mladenovic is also working on measuring the overall changes in tree canopy to provide us with feedback on whether our tree canopy is declining, increasing or just staying the same.
Our goal is to have trees covering 40% of Long Branch.
How Neighbourwoods© Works in Long Branch
Our teams of students will come to your property and ask permission to enter your yard and conduct their inventory. Among other things, they will:
- identify the species of every tree in your yard
- measure the size of each tree and estimate the age
- note the location of each tree
- evaluate the health of each tree.
How You Can Help
If you are interested in participating in our tree inventory project and having the tree data on your property added to our database, you can just email us with your name, address and phone number so we can arrange for one of our teams of students to come around.
To learn more about the Neighbourwoods project for 2020, and how you can participate, you can find a copy of our pamphlet in our documents folder.