Table of Contents 6 2012 OVATION Awards Winning Entries

OVATION Awards Winning Entry
Communication Management
Social Responsibility including Economic, Societal and Environmental Development
AWARD OF MERIT
Entrant’s Name: Janine Ivings, Senior Communications Advisor
Organization’s Name: Town of Oakville
Division/Category: Category 11: Social responsibility including economic, societal and environmental development
Title of Entry: Oakville Canopy Club
Time Period of Project: March‐November 2011
Brief Description: On June 21, 2011, the Town of Oakville launched the Oakville Canopy Club, an innovative
community outreach program that encourages residents and businesses to save Oakville’s tree canopy from the
threat of the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB)—an invasive insect from Asia that threatens to wipe out one of every 10
trees in the Town of Oakville. As a primary tree killer, this exotic insect can kill a healthy tree in two to three years
and has already killed more than 30 million trees since first being discovered in North America in 2002.
Business Need/Opportunity
While the Town of Oakville is taking the municipal lead in protecting its ash trees, a staggering 80 per
cent of Oakville's treatable ash tree canopy is located on private property. Ash trees which are still
healthy and structurally sound can be saved if residents and businesses know about them and choose to
treat them. This proved to be a huge opportunity for the Town of Oakville to educate residents,
encourage treatment and subsequently sparked the creation of the Oakville Canopy Club.
Almost 180,000 Oakville ash trees are at risk or dying due to EAB. Oakville’s 2011 EAB Program and
Canopy Cover Conservation Approach to EAB Management report sets ambitious goals to protect 75 per
cent of the ash canopy cover on public property and active parks from the threat of EAB through
TreeAzin injections. Dead or dying trees will be replaced with a new species of tree to meet Oakville’s
canopy cover objective of 40 per cent by 2057.
Oakville has proven itself as a leader in Urban Forestry and in EAB management. We’re the first
municipality in Canada to complete an early warning detection project to indentify the increase in insect
populations several years earlier than the current Canadian Food Inspection Agency method. In 2010,
the Town of Oakville employed state‐of‐the‐art technology to manage the threat of EAB. Tree inventory
efforts were undertaken via a Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) that provided a measurable inventory of the
town’s ash population on both public and private property.
As part of its EAB strategy, Oakville has ceased new planting of ash trees; implemented an EAB trapping
project; executed canopy conservation by under planting new species of trees; treated select municipal
ash trees with TreeAzin; performed leading‐edge EAB research with several partner organizations;
became the first municipality in Canada to comprehensively define distribution of EAB throughout a
community; and completed a tree inventory project. Staff will continue lobbying other levels of
government and are incorporating new treatment alternatives as they become available.
Intended audience(s)
The target audiences are broad as this infestation is not a local phenomenon. Municipalities across