When Ian Seccafien began his career in local government the young arborist “understood intrinsically” that trees were assets but struggled to convince colleagues in other departments, who held more traditional views on asset management.
“I remember having conversations and recommending that we treat trees as assets and set up our budget with asset life cycles, but I could never get any traction,” he says.
“There was always this ‘no, you can’t put them on a balance sheet, and you can’t depreciate them, therefore we don’t need a plan for them’”.
Fast forward to 2025 and Seccafien has moved on to the City of Marion, where he is now the Coordinator of Arboriculture.
Originally a horticulturalist, Seccafien’s career progression started out in the field as an arborist, which he added to through professional education with qualifications in management and leadership.
Today, he is the leader of a team of around 15, implementing one of Australia’s most significant local government green asset management programs.
At Marion, a suburban Adelaide council with a population of around 95,000 spread across 55 square kilometres, Seccafien has led an ambitious program of tree planting which has developed into a formal Tree Asset Management Plan, with a target of increasing the urban tree canopy by 20% from the existing level of 12%.
To achieve this, Seccafien and his team are planning 4,300 trees each year across 80 species, aiming to have majority of them planted by the 2028 financial year.
“We started off with a plan to put around 3,500 trees a year into the ground, and at that time Marion had a very low level of tree canopy,” he says.
“The state government did a LiDAR flyover of metropolitan Adelaide and it really opened our eyes, because at that time we had only 8.5% tree canopy and were the twelfth most vulnerable to urban heat island effects.”
“Once the elected members saw that they were really determined to do something about it.”
The program is heavily focused on tree planting, but it is being assisted in an innovative way by data and software which treats the trees as assets.
Marion was the second council to implement the Forestree Tree Management System, a South Australian-developed software now used by more than 50 councils Australia wide.
“With the software you can capture all your trees on an individual basis and manage them all holistically as individual assets,” says Seccafien.
“You can map existing trees, manage risk, plan for and implement planting programs which automatically transfer into the watering programs.
The software is capable of calculating unit rates “for everything we do relating to a tree.”
This includes what it costs to plant, establish, maintain over the short and long term and also what it costs to remove, and this information is part of the asset management plan.
We calculate our asset replacement value based on what it cost to buy and plant new trees. Using a tree valuation developed at the City of Melbourne, Seccafien and his team can calculate an individual dollar value based on Amenity.
“From this, we have been able to understand that we have a $18 million replacement value on our 66,000 trees,” he says.
A better understanding of the asset base also led to insights on resourcing. Marion had resources to maintain 36,000 trees, and yet there were 66,000.
This informed a two year journey which leveraged a ten year funding commitment of $34 million so that internal resources were better able to meet the levels of service.
“Setting our budgets is much easier now because we pull the forecasts out of the financial modelling we did and update the planting and population figures,” says Seccafien.
“From there, the program recalculates what we need to spend.”
The state government’s next flyover is scheduled for 2026, and Seccafien is confident that the canopy targets can be met.
“Down the track we will be able to explore metrics on the economic and environmental value that the trees deliver in terms of oxygen they produce, how much carbon they store,” he says.
On an anecdotal basis Seccafien can see this on a daily basis as streets which were previously bare have been transformed through new and growing tree cover.
Businesses, which may have complained at one time about the tree planting program, have changed their attitudes, and some are asking for more trees because they know they attract people and increase customers to the area.
Tree management and urban greening are consistently rated as high priorities in ratepayer surveys, with engagement levels significantly higher than for other issues.
“The community really values its trees and really wants us to make these investments,” says Seccafien.
“We have something like five and a half thousand customer requests relating to trees each year, and if we take out a tree because it is at the end of its lifecycle then we always get requests to replace it and plant more trees.”
