TREE FUND AND UTILITY ARBORIST ASSOCIATION CELEBRATE 15 YEARS OF UTILITY ARBORIST RESEARCH FUND GRANT PROGRAM

Tree Research and Education Endowment Fund (TREE Fund) and the Utility Arborist Association (UAA) are celebrating 15 years of the Utility Arborist Research Fund Grant Program (UARF Grant), which was created in 2010 and has granted out over $712,500 to researchers since its inception.

The UARF Grant Program is a research grant managed by TREE Fund that focuses on research that is beneficial to utility tree care professionals. Co-sponsored by the UAA, it provides grants of up to $50,000 annually. Applications for this grant are being accepted during TREE Fund’s Spring Grant Application cycle and requires letters of intent to be submitted by March 1. Completed applications are due by March 15.

“The research that has been funded by the UARF Grant over the years has been imperative for the growth of industry best practices and the safety of utility arborists,” said Dennis Fallon, Executive Director of UAA. “In the grant description, it says that the purpose of the grant is to ‘finance work with real importance and benefit to utility tree care professionals,’ and we believe that the scope of what this program has brought will continue to be beneficial for years to come.”

Recent studies funded by the UARF Grant includes research projects titled “Improving Future Utility Vegetation Management Options by Developing a Public Collection of Open-Source Annotated Machine Learning Data Archive,” “Determining Failure Characteristics from Distribution Outage Reports,” and “Characterizing the Risk of Electrical Contact to Arborists,” which was done by John Goodfellow and John Ball, who presented their findings at a TREE Fund Webinar in 2023 to over 800 people.

“The UAA has been a wonderful partner for this grant program for the past 15 years,” said Paul Putman, President and CEO of TREE Fund. “The research this grant has been able to fund over the years has proved to be of great importance to utility arborists when it comes to worker safety, vegetation management, public relations, and tree related outages. The public may not completely understand the vast scope of the work that goes into the management of trees and vegetation near utilities, but the workers that need the latest research use this information every day to do their jobs safely.”

For information on how to apply to the UARF grant or to make a donation directly to this grant program, see TREE Fund’s website, www.treefund.org/utility-arborist-research-fund.

TREE Fund is a non-profit organization whose mission is to support scientific discovery and dissemination of new knowledge in the fields of arboriculture and urban forestry. TREE Fund promotes scientific inquiry designed to benefit commercial, residential, utility and consulting arborists, urban foresters, and other professionals in related fields in their shared work to create, support and sustain vibrant urban canopies. TREE Fund hosts ten grant programs and six scholarship programs. More information can be found at www.treefund.org.

The UAA is an organization of over 5,000 individuals with interest in and a commitment to the maintenance of trees and other vegetation for the purpose of ensuring the safe and reliable distribution of energy, including electric, oil and gas, to business and residences. More information can be found at www.gotouaa.org.