Nearly fifty tornadoes touched down in southern and central Indiana this spring. Weeks since the most recent storm, the damage remains. Scores of trees have been destroyed throughout all of Monroe county; the Indiana University campus alone lost three hundred trees.
But two institutions at Indiana University--the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change, or CIPEC--have come together to conduct a study of how people, government, institutions and the environment affect the sustainability of urban ecosystems. This week on Noon Edition, we sat down with Tom Evans, the director of CIPEC; Lee Huss, Bloomington's city forester; and IU Director of Landscape Architecture Mia Williams, who's also the head of the Tree Campus USA Committee. We talked about how the decisions we make about replanting after storms may affect the future of urban forests in Indiana.