Ah, April in Paris. There's a song in your heart, love in the air ... and bugs in the trees.
These "bugs" are there by design, though. Tree surgeons in the City of Light are embedding computer chips in all of the 90,000 trees lining the streets and boulevards in a monitoring operation of unprecedented scale.
"It takes less than 15 minutes to embed a 3-centimeter long computer chip in the trunk and enter the data in a computer," said Christian Mantaux, a tree surgeon for two decades.
He assures nature lovers that the chips do not harm trees. On the contrary, when they are all installed by the end of 1999, it will be much easier to take care of them.
The chips contain an identification number which, when read by a mobile computer, gives a readout on the trees' location, age, and condition.
"With the new system, we will be able to know almost instantaneously how trees are doing, and therefore treat them rapidly when necessary," said Jean-Pol Neme of the city council.
"Before, when a lumberman noticed something was wrong with a tree, he might not have located it perfectly because there are often many trees next to the same street number," Neme said. "When he or a colleague returned, he risked cutting or treating the wrong tree."
Other cities have been looking for a way of creating a database for their trees that would be easy to update. Mannheim, Germany, and London's Royal College have both tested systems but have failed to achieve satisfactory results.
Neme said that with the help of Adage, a leading company in the electronic identification market, Paris was the first to design an adequate system for its alignment trees -- those planted individually in 1,400 of the city's 4,800 streets.
Other cities are now seeking to buy the process.
The cost is 39 francs ($7) for each tree, including 22 francs for the Malaysian-made chip.
"Compared with the 15,000 francs minimum cost of a new tree, this is nothing," Neme said.
The system will significantly improve the monitoring of alignment trees which are far more fragile than those in woods or parks. The people in charge of such things put the tree population of Paris at 473,000.
Car exhaust, dog urine, and other pollution make life hell for a plane tree, even one planted along the elegant Champs Elysees. It's not like an oak in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris' largest park, that can quietly breathe fresh air. A tree usually lives at least three decades longer in a wooded area than in a street.
Salting streets in winter to melt snow can also prove deadly for trees, Neme said. "We know now that pruning them in July or August following the salting operation can save trees, but this must be done in time and planned in advance. The new system will be very useful for that purpose."
Besides healing occasional diseases, the Paris authorities have one major concern: avoiding epidemics. "Thirty years ago, there were 13,000 elms in the city," Neme said. "Now there are only 10 percent left because of devastating epidemics."
Nearly 40 percent of Paris alignment trees are plane trees, known for their strength and resistance to storms and pollution. But the high number of these trees could make them all the more vulnerable to epidemic.
Plane-tree epidemics have devastated areas in Italy and the French city of Marseille. One was stopped in Lyon, but nobody can predict if it will develop again, Neme said.
He said that only careful computerized monitoring of trees will ultimately prevent the pleasant, shady streets from turning into gray, monotonous thoroughfares.
