Educator, Grade 8 student team up for Alberta Grade 1 tree-mapping project

If you grew up and went to elementary school in Alberta over the last 60-plus years, you would have been given a tree seedling to plant in Grade 1.

Do you remember where you planted your Grade 1 tree?

If you grew up and went to elementary school in Alberta over the last 60-plus years, you would have been given a tree seedling to plant in Grade 1. The Alberta government program as seen nearly 70,000 lodgepole pine and white spruce trees handed out to Grade 1 students over the the years during Alberta Forest Week.

Now, a local educator and a Grade 8 student have paired up to try to map these trees.

“I’ve been interested in heritage trees for a while,” said educator and tree enthusiast Dustin Bajer.

“There’s been some efforts in the past and so lists have been out there but absent from those lists are a lot of our native spruce trees.

“I ran into Josh about six months ago and he was also interested in spruce trees and so we started talking about the fact that these trees are missing and we realized that actually, many of us have this relationship, have this connection to our Grade 1 spruce trees.”

Grade 8 student Joshua Kirsch’s interest in heritage trees was sparked just over two years ago, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when his school library was handing out books and he received one titled Heritage Trees of Alberta.

“This book talked about hundreds of trees in Alberta that were old, big, unique, you name it. If it was special, it was in that book. So that book really sparked my interest and I decided to create my own map to map other heritage trees in Edmonton,” Kirsch said.