NYS DEC sees nursery investments, Tree Tracker tool as path to 25 million trees by 2033

Albany — New York’s Tree Tracker dashboard says that there’s been 177,141 trees planted since the initiative began in 2024. The State’s goal in 25 million by 2033, so at this point, they’ll need to pick up the pace to reach that goal.

One way they hope to reach that goal is tracking the planted trees, through a new Tree Tracker portal.

“The Tree Tracker tool is the first time New York State has tracked public and private tree planting in one place,” DEC Division of Lands and Forests Director Fiona Watts says. “It provides real time updates, a map that shows tree planting by region, county and locality. It’s able to tell stories about where people plant trees and what species and type of tree they plant, and size and what type of a project their tree planting involved. So people can share photographs, even of their newly planted trees and forests. So it’s a real place for people to gather together, learn, share and grow.”

After the Governor announced this initiative at her 2024 State of the State, CBS6 visited the Saratoga Tree Nursery, the only of its kind in the State, to see what the process looks like. As a part of this push, the Nursery is receiving millions in funding to facilitate infrastructure upgrades, and more planting.

“An initiative takes some time to build like this, we expect to see many more trees going into production and being planted out as we work with partners and stakeholders to build resources to support the program, to work through some incentives and develop programs to achieve the goal,” Watts says. “So it’s not something we can anyone can do alone, but we’re going to work together to scale up as the years go on. One of the really exciting parts of the initiative is the Governor has funded the modernization of our the last remaining tree nursery in New York State. It’s the Saratoga Tree Nursery, and we are going to modernize the nursery and expand the capacity from growing about a million tree seedlings a year to more like six to eight million tree seedlings a year. So as that project advances, over the course of the next several years, we’re going to see even our own public production of tree seedlings grow significantly to contribute to the effort.”