Articles

Study: 54 Acres of Trees Lost Daily

By Stacy Shelton
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
April 15, 2005

Every day, construction crews lay another 28 acres of asphalt, concrete and rooftops on top of metro Atlanta.

That's nearly equivalent to the inside of Lenox Square or Gwinnett Place mall.

An analysis of satellite images taken in 1992 and 2001 gives planners and the public another eye-popping way to add up metro Atlanta's rapid growth.

The analysis of Landsat Satellite data by University of Georgia researchers also found a 16-county region lost 54 acres of trees a day during the decade. That's up from the 50-acres-a-day loss calculated between 1988 and 1998.

Georgia Forestry Commission Director Kenneth C. Stewart Jr. called the combination of tree loss and added hardtop "disastrous." It leads to more heat, more flooding, more air pollution and higher energy bills, he said.

The Forestry Commission funded the research project with a $20,000 grant to the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, a river advocacy group, which in turn contracted with UGA for the work.

Riverkeeper Executive Director Sally Bethea said the numbers are "a wake-up call as to how fast we're hardening the face of the earth that usually takes the rainwater. . . . It's no wonder that there's so much flooding, stream bank erosion and mud in metro neighborhoods."

Another way to look at the data is that for every two acres of trees cut down, about one acre of roads, parking lots, driveways and rooftops is added.

Riverkeeper and the Forestry Commission will continue mining the data and presenting it to area groups. They want the public, decision-makers and developers to refer to it as they figure out how to squeeze an additional 2.3 million people into metro Atlanta over the next 25 years.

"We still have a chance to protect this region while we grow, if there's the political will and the demand for that kind of protection," Bethea said.

In 2003, the 16 counties agreed to some basic principles to protect their water sources, including the Chattahoochee River, which supplies drinking water to about 3 million metro Atlantans. The principles include strategies for reducing hardscapes with grassy areas, and constructing wetlands to filter polluted stormwater runoff before it reaches a stream. But very few cities and counties are practicing the preachings in the $8 million watershed protection plan.

The hardscape and tree loss information was presented for the first time Thursday to a committee of the Atlanta Regional Commission, the planning body for 13 counties.

ARC Director Charles "Chick" Krautler said he's not sure what the new findings can tell us.

"Obviously the more pavement, the more rooftop that you add in the region, the more potential problems you have with runoff, heat island effects and all of those things that are being studied nationally," Krautler said.

Earlier, ARC's environmental planning chief, Pat Stevens, told the collection of elected officials and appointees that if just one-quarter of the land draining to a stream is covered up in hardscape, the stream will be degraded. When that happens, there are environmental and economic consequences. As the pollution increases, aquatic species die off and the cost of treating the water to drinking standards goes up.

Stevens said no watershed area has yet reached that cap, but several are approaching it.

Liz Kramer, director of UGA's Natural Resources Spatial Analysis Laboratory and lead researcher on the project, said the next step is to quantify the consequences of "this dramatic change in the landscape."

One downfall of the data is that it does not distinguish between a grassy driveway and one made of concrete.

GREEN VS. GRAY

Acres of Trees Lost Per Day in a 16-County Metro Area

Bartow......-2
Cherokee....-6
Clayton.....-1
Cobb........-3
Coweta......-1
DeKalb......-2
Douglas.....-2
Fayette.....-1
Forsyth.....-4
Fulton......-4
Gwinnett....-8
Hall........-9
Henry.......-3
Paulding....-1
Rockdale....-1
Walton......-6
Total......-54

Acres of Concrete, Asphalt and Rooftops Added Per Day

Bartow .....+1
Cherokee....+1
Clayton.....+2
Cobb........+4
Coweta......+1
DeKalb......+2
Douglas.....+1
Fayette.....+1
Forsyth.....+1
Fulton......+5
Gwinnett....+5
Hall........+1
Henry.......+1
Paulding....+1
Rockdale....+1
Walton.......0
Total......+28

Source: University of Georgia Institute of Ecology

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