Tree Planting Standards

To best cater to equitable canopy growth in Bloomington, we've created prioritization models and standard practices. These help us indicate what areas and neighborhoods are in highest needs of trees and how we facilitate planting projects.

Our Standards

CanopyBloomington’s mission is to grow canopy AND community in the City of Bloomington, and we must prioritize based on available resources. Our Priority Planting Guidelines are below.

We plant within Bloomington's city boundaries only
We prioritize plantings according to our priority maps and support from the planting area community. First priority is “high priority” neighborhoods or areas, and second priority is “moderate priority” neighborhoods or areas (see how we established our priority planting areas here).
We plant exclusively where we have community support for a planting and a commitment from our community partners to help water newly planted trees for the first 3 growing seasons.
We prioritize plantings of multiple trees at one time:
- At least 20 trees for residential neighborhoods
- At least 5 trees for single-site, institutional landholders (e.g. apartment buildings, schools, churches, nonprofits, businesses)
We plant no more than 4 trees on a single residential property except for institutional residential properties (apartment buildings).
For institutional landholder plantings, we require at least a 1:1 ratio of trees to volunteers from the institution.
Plantings are exclusively in the fall and spring, the optimal times to put trees in the ground.

Examples of priority planting events:

Residential neighborhood planting
- At least 20-trees
- 5 households at 4 trees each, OR 10 households at 2 trees each
School planting
- At least 10-trees
- 10 volunteers (1:1 tree to volunteer ratio)

Requests falling outside of our Priority Planting Guidelines:

We are happy to share advice or educational materials but will not supply and/or plant a tree unless the property owner donates an amount that exceeds the cost of the tree.

A single residential property owner who requests one or more trees be planted on their property.
Institutional landholders and residential properties outside of our priority neighborhoods or areas

Prioritization for Institutional Landholders:

If you're a school, place of worship, non-profit, or other business in Bloomington, please use the following identification methods to determine whether your property is within a high, moderate, or low priority area.

If your property is within a residential neighborhood boundary, use the above priority ranking levels.
If your property is outside of a residential neighborhood boundary, use the priority ranking levels for zoning districts below. Zoning districts are the smallest geographic level used in the Bloomington canopy cover assessment.