michael slater

Urban Planning, Landscape Design & Arboriculture

Cultivating successful places

Michael Slater, planner, landscape designer, and ISA Certified Arborist.

My work explores how planning, landscape, ecology, and the built environment come together to shape the places where we live.

I am a planner, landscape designer, and ISA Certified Arborist based in Salem, Oregon. This site brings together my professional practice, civic and policy work, and writing about landscapes, communities, and the places we inherit and shape over time.

I work independently and in collaboration with architects, landscape architects, public agencies, property owners, and facilities staff, bringing particular attention to how landscapes develop and perform over time.

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Professional Practice

Community & Environmental Planning

Landscape Planning & Design

Landscape Renewal & Management

Arboriculture

& Urban Forestry

Master planning for neighborhoods, parks, open spaces, and natural areas. Environmental planning, ecological networks, land-use analysis, and conservation and rehabilitation strategies.

Landscape master plans, conceptual and schematic design, planting plans, and plant selection for residential, institutional, public, and other landscapes.

Landscape assessments, rehabilitation plans, plant collection management, and long-term care strategies to preserve and improve established landscapes.

Independent tree health and condition assessments, tree inventories, preservation and planting plans, and management of significant tree collections and urban forests.

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Selected Work

Planning and landscape challenges rarely fit neatly within a single discipline. These projects illustrate an approach that brings together planning, design, plants, trees, ecology, and long-term stewardship.

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Grounded

My recent writing on how we shape the places where we live—from city policy to the plants outside our front door — and why.

Re-Launching My Consulting Practice

I'm pleased to announce that I'm relaunching my consulting business, offering landscape planning and design, arboricultural consulting, and ecological and land-use planning services in Salem and the Willamette Valley. Some of you may remember my earlier garden design and management business. As much as I enjoyed working in gardens, I developed some joint problems that made the physical demands of the work increasingly difficult. I decided to shift my professional focus and we

Are Coyotes Good Urban Citizens

Cities are, by definition, areas with significantly higher human populations than the surrounding landscapes. And as we concentrate resources to support urban residents, we attract other animals looking to take advantage of what cities have to offer. Pests such as rats and pigeons may come to mind. Or perhaps we think of more charismatic creatures such as raccoons (which may be on the way to domestication). But for some, it is coyotes. Anthropocene’s Warren Cornwall reports o

Cougars Save Lives, New Study Finds

Cougars save lives. That is the counterintuitive finding of a recent study published in Current Biology (paywall). Researchers working with several local tribes on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula tracked cougar and deer movements and then overlaid those data with automobile collision data. They found that the presence of cougars influenced the movement of deer, resulting in substantially fewer crashes —a striking example of how the ecological effects of predators can translate

About Me

I am an urban planner, landscape designer, and ISA Certified Arborist based in Salem, Oregon. My professional and civic experience includes urban and regional planning, landscape design, arboriculture, natural-resource conservation, public landscape management, nonprofit leadership, and community involvement.

I serve on the Salem Planning Commission and I am actively engaged in questions about how Salem and the Willamette Valley grow and change.

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Contact Me

Email: michael.k.slater@gmail.com

Phone: 202.425-5493