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After commissioning its most thorough tree inventory to date, University Park is finding that it likely has more trees than people.

Students from the nearby University of Maryland, College Park, spent four days in October counting more than 1,300 trees along the streets of the town, which has a population of 2,300.

Survey volunteers focused primarily on counting trees lining town streets. There are likely still thousands of uncounted trees in the town when private and park property is included, said Mickey Beall, the town's public works director.

In the weeks ahead, the team will develop a searchable tree database, which the town will use to better pinpoint locations, prioritize pruning and removal and schedule plantings.

"We are under county rules which say we have to account for all of our infrastructure, and trees are included in that," said Mayor John Tabori. "We like to be a little bit more precise."

In August, the town approached Taylor Keen — coordinator of geographic information system inventories for the university — and asked if he was interested in counting the town's trees. Keen, who led an inventory of about 660 trees in College Park in 2007, agreed to branch out to a new municipality.

"It was just a logical extension of projects I've worked on before," said Keen, who also manages the university's tree inventory.

He assembled 31 student volunteers and four graduate team leaders, who identified each tree's species, physical dimensions and overall health, and mapped them all using the school's GIS technology.

There were advantages in completing the survey so soon, Keen said. It could have gotten much tougher had they stuck around long enough for the leaves to fall off the trees.

"In some cases, it's dramatically easier to differentiate when you have the leaves available," he said, adding that the alternative, identifying by bark, is far more difficult. "We're very lucky that it all came together as quickly as did."

Tabori hopes Keen's group will return next year to survey the trees in the town park, and eventually count the remaining ones on private property.

"It will improve our ability to plan what we plant, where and why," Beall said. "There's the potential to plan ahead for the decline of trees and things like that."

The project cost the town about $10,000, Beall said, which was spent on GIS hardware and software and to pay Keen and the graduate team leaders.

The benefits of trees are well-documented. They absorb carbon dioxide — a major contributor to global warming — and release oxygen. They also reduce home cooling and heating costs by blocking sunlight and shielding against winds, and can increase a home's appraised value by as much as 20 percent, according to the National Arbor Day Foundation.

University Park has become increasingly conscious of its environmental impact in recent years, developing a town bus system that 10 percent of residents now use, Tabori said. He added that a healthy, well-kept tree population would be another major step toward greening things up.

"There's a lot of talk about, ‘Are you carbon neutral?' these days," he said. "Our carbon footprint is pretty low, and this would allow us to calculate that."