They provide food and shelter for hundreds of birds, insects and critters that also call this place home. Yet in South Florida, known for its lush foliage and tropical topography, large landscapes are virtually treeless. Boulevards of canopied tree tunnels are few. Suburbia is awash with red roofs, with little green sprouting through. A tree canopy is critical to South Florida, where the subtropical sun is stronger than in most of the nation.
Trees act as pollution filters, creating cleaner air.
They can reduce home energy costs by as much as 50 percent. They shade us, lowering our increasingly warm temperatures. But trees shade an average of only 10 percent of Miami-Dade County, according to a 1996 survey by American Forests, the nation's oldest citizen conservation organization, founded in 1875. In Broward, tree canopies range from 7.7 to 24.8 percent according to five areas sampled in 1998. These percentages are considerably lower than the 25 to 33 percent average for an American city, and the 40 percent canopy considered ideal by American Forests.