Natural Areas Laborer at City of Surrey in Surrey, BC
For my first co-op term, I have been working with the City of Surrey in their Urban Forestry department as a Natural Areas Labourer. The City of Surrey is one of BC’s largest municipalities with flourishing greenspaces. A city growing as fast as Surrey has been Within that position I have learned many aspects of managing an urban forest. As broad as the city’s main overarching goals, down to the hands-on in the field work done by us labourers. Our main projects have been invasive species management. That process looks like site inspections, followed by risk assemeents then removal of plants. Trail pruning, which is an annual program in which us labourers and practitioners prune trails to a 1 meter setback on each side (up to 2 meters depending on the species of interest). And demand work, which is mainly based on members of the public submitting service requests of areas within natural areas that they see as a hazard. After requests are submitted, our technicians review the requests and send out in-house workers, which are us, or contract out larger jobs. During my time in the field, I have dialed in my native, and invasive plant ID from shrubs to trees. There is so much hands-on knowledge to learn outside of the classroom, and Forestry Co-op has been providing me with just that!