Arborist interns help maintain campus trees

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campus experience 1:11 Arborist interns help maintain campus trees

By:

Luke Hayes

21 Feb 2025

Clara Betts and Erik Cumpston, interns with the Urban Forestry team in Virginia Tech's Division of Facilities, help monitor and maintain over 11,000 trees that cover Virginia Tech's campus.

I'm Clara Betts. I am currently majoring in ecological restoration. My name is Erik. I graduated spring of 2024. I was a biological sciences major. Today, we were working on tree inventory, which is a way of mapping the trees on our campus. We look at the overall health of the tree, how much of the crown is missing from the tree, how the tree is growing and keeping up over the years. I applied for the arborist internship because I wanted to expand my knowledge with tree identification, as well as tree health and tree planting. I just wanted to continue my ecological knowledge, my land management skills, get more experience with field work. It's been a great way to learn how to give back to the land and, like, you know, our community as well, because with the work that we've done in the Old Growth forest helping bring back native species and remove invasive ones and figuring out how to make that more sustainable.

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