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Recent Awards and Recognitions

Working in cooperation with Golden Gate National Recreation Area and the Department of Landscape Architecture at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation received a 2008 Preservation Design Award from the California Preservation Foundation for the Historic Resource Study for Muir Woods National Monument. Historical Landscape Architect John Auwaerter and Historian John F. Sears, Ph.D. created a richly illustrated narrative including graphic mapping of change over time, that reveals the site as an icon of American conservation – a place where, in January 1908, the federal government first placed nature preservation above urban development interest, based on a gift of private land from William and Elizabeth Thacher Kent. Muir Woods endures today a cultural landscape that is testimony both to this pioneering achievement and to more than a century of changing attitudes toward natural resource conservation. The documentation in this study led to a listing of Muir Woods in the National Register of Historic Places on January 8, 2008, the centennial of the monument’s designation.

Dan McCarthy and Charles Pepper of the Olmsted Center received the 2009 Andrew Clark Hecht Public Safety Achievement Award for their management of the Arborist Training Program. Over the past several years, national park managers have recognized an increasing need to improve the condition of trees in high use visitor areas.  As trees in these parks age and their condition deteriorates, the risk of injury to visitors and damage to adjacent park resources increases.  The Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation’s Arborist Training Program provides park staff with comprehensive training that ensures that participants develop specialized hazard awareness and safety skills while effectively maintaining and preserving park resources. This tree care program has effectively integrated skills building and education with hands-on resource management work at parks. Over the past ten years, the program has stabilized hundreds of hazard trees, improved the condition of park resources, strengthened employee knowledge and abilities in tree care and significantly increased visitor safety at parks throughout the service.