Restoring Nature's Services - Urban Parks Program

North East Trees (NET) designs and builds community, neighborhood, open space and river adjacent parks and trails for the purpose of native habitat restoration and passive recreation. NET has implemented over 35 different mini-parks, trails, street and access gateway improvements and landscape improvement projects in partnership with a number of state, regional, county and city agencies within the Greater Los Angeles Area. This has been done using native plants, water conserving irrigation systems, and locally obtained natural and recycled materials (e.g., river rock, broken concrete, mulch, decompos ed granite). While much remains to be done towards restoring the ecosystem functionality of local rivers, streams, and associated watershed, there is now recognition among agency stakeholders of the need to design and build more such parks and landscape improvements for the purpose of “restoring nature’s services”.

North East Trees has a long history of converting under-utilized open space along the Los Angeles River and other rivers and tributaries to valuable neighborhood and community parks. The Urban Parks Program has been also been used to convert paved areas within public schools to environmentally sustainable improvements, to develop under-utilized public space along utility corridors, and to convert degraded open space within existing regional open space in Elysian Park, Debs Park and other regional open space areas to sustainable conservation areas. The same skills that have been used in such efforts, North East Trees is now using to develop designs for new community parks that include measures to detain and infiltrate stormwater and improve water quality as feasible, both along the Los Angeles River and elsewhere in the County of Los Angeles.