Education Review Program

2017 | Eric Wiseman, PhD, Virginia Tech and Co-Investigator Mrs. Sarah Gugercin, Virginia Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation

Virginia Tech will be conducting an arboriculture education benchmark review on behalf of TREE Fund. Virginia Tech, located in Blacksburg, VA, is a national leader in urban forestry and arboriculture education and research. The project lead will be Dr. Eric Wiseman, associate professor of urban forestry and ISA Certified Arborist. He will supervise a team of research associates skilled in information management, database programming, and website media. This group has extensive experience in urban forestry research projects that are national in scope and has expertise in a number of technologies needed to gather, analyze, and report the information requested for this project. The project will comprise three phases: a discovery phase, an analysis phase, and a dissemination phase. The discovery phase will entail systematic searches of websites and online databases to inventory organizations involved in arboriculture/urban forestry educational grant-making programs, followed up with distribution of an online survey to inventory additional organizations and gather data on the full range of grant-making programs for the period 2012–2017. The analysis phase will entail organizing, analyzing, and archiving the data. Virginia Tech has unrivaled access to technologies that will facilitate data analysis to meet TREE Fund’s information needs and ensure long-term accessibility to this information. The dissemination phase will entail creating a website hosted by Virginia Tech that will serve as a clearinghouse for the project final report and provide a searchable database and information visualizations.