Removals of mature oaks and pines in Gainesville, a longtime “tree city” designee, drew scrutiny this summer as the city began construction on a new public safety center near Archer Road and Interstate 75.
What happens when chainsaws quiet and trucks cart off the last trunks?
Gainesville code offers a few options to compensate for the loss. Sometimes, public workers sink spades into soil and plant new trees in city greenspace. But as development encroaches and plantable space shrinks, city staff is increasingly turning its efforts to buying and preserving forested land.
Here’s why and how its strategy is shifting:
Gainesville has millions in tree mitigation money
Urban trees do cities a lot of good, said Teagan Young, a postdoctoral associate in forestry at the University of Florida. Their leaves pull in carbon dioxide and release cooling water vapor in a one-two punch against warming weather. Their roots guide water deep into the soil and hold it in place, guarding against erosion.
A 2016 study of Gainesville’s trees pegged the monetary value of their ecosystem benefits at $24.4 million per year.
The penalty for cutting them down isn’t cheap.
While rules for homeowners are more lenient, developers can owe the city hundreds or thousands of dollars for each tree wider than eight inches that they remove and don’t replace.
Between the 2019 and 2024 fiscal years, the city collected $10.3 million from projects that cut down regulated trees, according to a five-year snapshot of city data. The next year brought in an additional $3.8 million, said Brian Singleton, Gainesville’s interim chief operating officer.
“ The fund has been growing,” Singleton said, “Our expenditures have not kept up with the revenues.”
Experts say it’s not feasible to spend it all on trees alone
Compared with other city expenses, buying and planting trees “doesn't cost a whole lot of money,” Singleton said.
The city spent $110,800 on tree planting between 2019 and 2024, according to its snapshot, less than what it spent on the salaries and benefits of so-called “tree mitigation” staff.
Ryan Klein, an assistant professor of arboriculture at UF who volunteers on Gainesville’s Tree Advisory Board, said the city doesn’t have enough plantable space to accommodate all the trees it could afford.
Planners have to consider underground cables and stormwater lines. They can’t plant under power lines or too close to roads.
Even planting in parks requires careful planning, Singleton said, because public, open green space for soccer games and kickball matches is important, too.
Urban trees are often planted in small spaces with poor soil quality, Young said. “They’re not reaching that adult size, which means we’re not getting the most amount of benefit that we could from those trees,” she said.
It can take between 20 to 25 years for a tree to start paying “net” benefits, Klein said, once its cooling and carbon capabilities outweigh the water and work required to help it grow.
“That's not to say it might not die in the process from storm damage, a severe drought, might get hit by a car, whatever the case may be,” he said. “So if you can preserve trees that are already paying net benefits, then you’re better off.”
As Gainesville urbanizes, the city is leaning into land acquisition as a legitimate tree protection strategy
The population of Gainesville’s metro area grew 17.8% between 2010 and 2024, outpacing the nationwide rate of 9.9%, according to census data. UF demographers expect growth throughout Alachua County to continue, boosted by Floridians relocating from communities threatened by sea level rise.
“Developers see that and they’re jumping on it,” Klein said. He worries that if Gainesville’s forested land isn’t intentionally protected, it will disappear.
Groups like Alachua County Forever, a county-run program, and Alachua Conservation Trust, a nonprofit, work to buy and block natural lands from development in the area.
In the past three or four years, Gainesville’s tree mitigation program has doubled down on its own acquisition efforts.
Staff has always monitored land listings, Singleton said, “but now we're shifting to take a more active role of looking at properties off the market and then picking up the phone, knocking on doors, and seeing if we can't work out a deal.”
Gainesville expanded its tree mitigation staff from one part-time role in 2024 to nine full-time employees in 2026 to lead the push.
The city’s 2026 budget allocated $4 million of tree mitigation money to land acquisition.
Once a landowner expresses interest in selling, staff score the property according to a rubric developed by city horticulture professionals and the Tree Advisory Board. It considers things like the number of heritage trees and threatened or endangered species, potential water quality benefits, maintenance costs and recreational value.
So far, Gainesville has bought 50 wooded acres near Main Street and 39th Avenue, Four Creeks Preserve – in partnership with Alachua County – U.S. Highway 441 and a number of smaller plots, Singleton said. He also noted the tree mitigation team was working to acquire land around Tom Petty Park.
“ For every [property] that's acquired, there's probably 10 to 12 we discuss that it just never gets to that point,” Klein said. “A lot of times developers are willing to pay over fair market value.”
Some tree mitigation funds go toward infrastructure projects
Tree City residents resisted when Gainesville City Commissioners voted to remove a then-40-year-old live oak outside of Harry’s Seafood Bar & Grille in 2023. The sprawling tree’s roots had cracked and pushed the sidewalk, bringing the city out of compliance with Americans with Disabilities Act regulations and raising safety concerns.
Protesters won. The city kept the tree and converted the street parking alongside it from angled to parallel, giving the tree more space.
This strategy of rebuilding infrastructure around a tree accounted for the majority of tree fund spending, $1.1 million between 2019 and 2024.
An inventory of all of the city’s trees is almost done
Much of Gainesville’s knowledge about the scope and value of its trees comes from a 2016 study by UF and University of South Florida researchers.
After two years of work, Klein, UF forest systems professor Michael Andreu and collaborators are finishing an updated version of the study. They plan to present it to Gainesville commissioners this fall.
Previous work assessed random samples of the city’s urban forest in what is known as an ecological analysis. The current update does that, plus a complete inventory of Gainesville’s trees.
Researchers slinging measuring tapes documented every single tree over eight inches in diameter in a public place, somewhere over 25,000 trees, and loaded the information into a database. The study also tracked empty planting space, making it easier for planners to decide where to put mitigation trees.
“The city can use that as a management tool,” Klein said. “They know what they have, where they have it.”
