Steinbach residents may have noticed crews cutting down trees throughout the city recently.

Chris Freund is the City of Steinbach's arborist. He says more trees were marked with Dutch Elm Disease this year than normal.

“We have actually just started removing Dutch Elm Disease elm trees. We do have an increase this year, as of now, 295 to remove and so we are just kicking that off now. Normally we are just over 200 so, like I said, we have seen a bit of an increase this year.”

City Crews removing diseased elm trees from the Steinbach Soccer ParkIt is often sad to see elm trees go, especially when they are bigger mature trees and Freund notes it is not uncommon to see people step outside to see nearby trees come down. He says this year they are even removing some of the reasonably young elm trees at the Steinbach Soccer Park.

“Those ones are Dutch Elm Disease removals and we are actively replacing those as they get taken out. Replacing them with different species of trees just to try to get a little more variety”, says Freund, “We are trying to increase diversity pretty well throughout the entire city. We have done a fair bit of oak trees this year, some hackberries, really just a good variety, quite a few birch, some pine.”

Freund with increased diversity the cities trees are less likely to all be wiped out by any single disease.