September (Hybrid: In person & Zoom) 09/13/23

Climate Change and California's Trees

Climate change is impacting California's trees and will have further impacts in the future. Our speaker will discuss cutting edge techniques and strategies to maximize future tree value. His focus will be on trees that surround us every day: city trees and open space trees that beautify and enrich our lives. These trees provide a wide range of services that are easy to overlook, but which become obvious and painful when the trees are gone. Trees can help us adapt to climate change, but the choice of trees and planting methods will have a huge impact on the success of our efforts.

Dave Muffly, senior arborist and horticultural futurist

Dave Muffly has been planting trees, especially oaks, in the Bay Area and other California locations for more than 30 years. Muffly began his tree career where he received his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. Moving from engineering to ecology, he managed native oak tree plantings at Stanford in a project that has yielded more than 4,000 established oaks in 40 years. Muffly then branched into fruit trees and urban tree plantings, with a special focus on street trees. He subsequently became a Board Certified Master Arborist and designed/oversaw a thousand-tree Freeway Soundwall planting. This radical and experimental 1000-tree, drought-adapted planting succeeded far beyond expectations, and laid the foundation for changes reverberating through the California tree nursery industry today. In 2011, Dave was hired by Steve Jobs to oversee the massive and shockingly successful Apple Park megacampus planting.