The University of Washington Tacoma campus is nestled in the city’s downtown, surrounded by busy streets and tall buildings. It’s a bustling urban campus.
Within the confines of these red brick and gray concrete buildings, there’s not a lot of green.
Until now.
Earlier this month, about 30 volunteers helped to break ground on a mini forest project. The work is led by students, all with the goal of improving their community.
Michael Dorner is a UW Tacoma student. He’s one of the people who made the mini forest project happen.
In a class where he and his peers were tasked with creating a project showcasing sustainability in downtown Tacoma, he and two other students came up with the idea to turn an empty patch of land on a corner of the college’s campus into a community green space.
“We realized that in this very downtown, urban setting, there's a lot of people around here that might get around fully without cars and don't really have a way to go out and go on a hike or see the forest,” Dorner said.
While Dorner and another student wanted to focus on increasing biodiversity, another student, Andrew Shams, wanted to establish a space for UW Tacoma students, too. Shams has since graduated.
“We fused our ideas together to allow this to sort of be a third space that allows people to convene, to relax, to socialize, but also to learn something about the city, to learn a little bit about local biodiversity (and) native plants in Washington that they may have never seen before,” Shams said.
The project has been in the works for two years. Shams even came back to campus for the planting.
“Knowing that we're all doing something with such collective net benefits for everyone in Tacoma, in the South Puget Sound area, it feels great,” he said.
Volunteers gingerly placed coniferous pines, shrubs, ferns and ground cover into the ground close together. The project follows a dense form of forestation called the Miyawaki Method, Dorner said.
The method originated in Japan. Instead of planting trees by themselves, things that would normally grow alongside them in a forest, like ferns and groundcovers, go into the ground at the same time.
“It requires a lot of density with trees and their friends, basically,” said Rubén Casas, an associate professor at UW Tacoma. He’s one of two professors on the project.
Before Casas found out about what Dorner and Shams were working on, he was already trying to tackle the same challenge.
“The inception of this was really, how can we create a space on campus that helps us think about other ways of growing our urban tree canopy so that some of these challenges that we're facing for a lack of trees can be met a lot sooner,” he said.
Tree canopy in Tacoma
Livia Petzinger, a sustainability coordinator at UW Tacoma, said this project is also important to Tacoma because, compared to the rest of the county, the city has much lower urban tree canopy coverage.
Tree canopy cover is what you see when you stand below a tree and look up at the branches and leaves overhead. According to the city of Tacoma, only about 20% of the city is covered by tree canopy.
Growing the tree canopy cover is also important to bettering health equity, Petzinger said.
“Trees help prevent air pollution,” she said. “They lead to better health outcomes, reduce stress for people who live in the area.”
A 2016 study found that neighborhoods with more trees have residents with better overall health. The study found that people in these neighborhoods had lower rates of obesity. There were also lower rates of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and asthma.
Other cities in the U.S have used the Miyawaki Method to grow their urban tree canopy cover. In fact, students at Western Washington University in Bellingham planted a mini forest using the method two years ago.
Students working in the university’s Learning Environment Action Discovery, or LEAD, restoration program noticed that an empty lot, co-owned by the college and the city, was in need of some care. It was overgrown by invasive species and filled with junk, said Beau Jay, who is a graduate student at Western and the co-director of LEAD.
“ So they started working on removing those invasive species and they began to read more about Dr. Akira Miyawaki's method of creating mini forests, and they were like, ‘Yeah, we could totally do this in the Pacific Northwest,’” Jay said.
Students planted trees, shrubs and ferns on the site in 2023. Jay said the project has been a big success, with many of the species surviving and thriving years later.
“ It's been extremely successful and it's just been a really beautiful project to watch grow,” Jay said.
And the trees have grown quickly. When they were planted, they were a foot tall. Last year, Jay said when they visited the site, the trees were his height, five feet. Now, the trees are over 10 feet tall.
The method is one that cities want to try because it is shown to make strides on tree canopy coverage quickly. If the method works as intended, the plants should grow faster than if they were planted as individuals.
That’s what the students and professors want to happen at UW Tacoma. In about half a day, people put nearly 200 plants into the ground on the vacant lot.
