The most important decision you make for your business is the people you hire. We know this because when we hire people at DeepRoot, we tend to keep them (we’ve grown over the years and have many recent hires, however some of our longest employees have been with us since the early 1990s). It is… More
Nearly eight years ago, we installed a large Silva Cell system along 48 blocks of downtown Minneapolis. Called Marquette and 2nd (MARQ2), this green stormwater infrastructure project is in an ultra-urban, mixed-use area that needed to accommodate mass transit, cars, and pedestrians. The designers (SEH and URS) specified Silva Cells for stormwater management in addition… More
This post is the third in a series of three sharing findings from research conducted on 10 Silva Cell projects across North America. Read part one about study design here and part two about our initial findings here. We’ve already shared some of the initial findings from this study in earlier posts. Today, we’ll discuss… More
This post is the second in a series of three sharing findings from research conducted on 10 Silva Cell projects across North America. Read part one, where we discuss the study design, data collection, and raw growth results, here. After designing the study and selecting the Silva Cell projects, we had to decide what performance… More
In order to document the growth and performance of trees in Silva Cells, and to validate our own approach to designing for both trees alone and trees-and-stormwater in combination, in 2015 we undertook a research and monitoring study of 10 Silva Cell projects across North America. This was a big project, as you might imagine…. More
Today marks the eighth and final episode of season 1 of Remarkable Objects (sob). Since this podcast is all about the intersection of nature and the urban environment, I wanted to use this last episode to talk about engaging ordinary citizens to create a better urban forest. As much as policies and regulations shape our… More
I’ve been a fan of Kaid Benfield’s writing for years, so I was incredibly excited when he agreed to be interviewed on Remarkable Objects. I was first introduced to his work as a reader of “Switchboard,” the blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council. His posts stood out to me because of their conversational tone,… More
Soil is not something I spent a lot of time thinking about before starting to work for DeepRoot. But in that time, I’ve come to see and appreciate soil as an almost-magical substance. Soil is foundational to so many things: the biological processes of billions of organisms, carbon sequestration, plant life, and the built environment… More
Hey there! “Environmental justice” was a relatively new term for me when I interviewed today’s guest, Shannon Lea Watkins. Shannon is a post-doctoral fellow who studies (in, uh, layman’s terms) how trees influence people and how people influence trees, and she recently published a study that asked an uncomfortable but important question: Is tree planting… More
(We’re bringing you this week’s episode of Remarkable Objects a little early, since Thursday is Thanksgiving here in the U.S. We’ll resume a normal publishing schedule next week.) After a decade of working in urban forestry (and editing this blog), I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the biggest challenges trees in cities face. There… More
