Are more trees dying in Vancouver than usual?

If you’ve noticed lots of dead or dying trees on the streets of Vancouver, you may not be alone. Some social media users took note of the apparent trend in a Reddit thread Monday, and the city’s Park Board X (formerly Twitter) account has been fielding complaints about dead trees all month. The City of Vancouver’s associate director of urban forestry and specialty parks, Joe McLeod, tells 1130 NewsRadio that he agrees there may be more dead trees now than usual, and the cause is multifaceted.

He says development and infrastructure renewal, density, people walking over tree pits, and vandalism all contribute to why trees die in the city. “There’s just a multitude of factors — new pests, new pathogens — that are affecting trees. So there’s always a very dynamic environment in cities, and trees seem to take the brunt of that stress,” said McLeod.

One Reddit user posited that the cause may have been the sudden, record-low temperatures that swept across the Lower Mainland in January, but McLeod says it’s rare that a single climate event could kill many trees at once. “It is really difficult to track the direct impacts from extreme weather events, because typically with weather, trees will be able to shoulder one or two, or three years consecutively of those types of events. but it’s when they kind of cumulatively build up season over season,” he said.

The trees in Vancouver have been through multiple extreme heat waves and cold snaps in recent years, and .