By Neil Doyle

NORMAL – Residents could see a lot more trees in McLean County over the next few years.

Tree Corps is a key strategy of the Ecology Action Center’s still-in-development BN Clean Air Plan, which will set targets for local reduction of both greenhouse gas emissions and air quality pollutants like ozone and develop strategies to reach those targets.

“As an initiative under this project we have a few different planting efforts going on this year and we hope to continue this for at least the next 10 years,” EAC executive director Michael Brown told WJBC’s Marc Strauss. “So at 10,000 trees a year, we should be hitting 100,000 trees or more by 2031.”

This is the EAC’s second such large scale tree planting initiative; the first was launched decades ago when the Ecology Action Center was known as Operation Recycle and included much of what is now Comlara Park.

The trees planted will all be native hardwood species including black oak, red oak, white oak, bur oak, pecan, and shagbark hickory.

The EAC is looking for volunteers and is challenging local groups to form Tree Corps planting teams. More information is available here.

Neil Doyle can be reached at [email protected]