A number of dying Arbutus trees along Eighth Avenue Norwest between Northwest 65th Street and Northwest 70th Street are candidates for removal and replacement, according to the city.

The trees were planted in 1996 by Seattle City Light. Under an agreement with City Light, the money needed to remove and replace the trees will come from the Seattle Department of Transportation's maintenance budget, said city arborist Nolan Runquist.

Ballard resident Shawn Murphy noticed many of the trees Eighth Avenue had stopped growing and were turning brown this spring.

The dying trees are troubling because they are beautiful and provide noise control and privacy for home owners, Murphy said in an email.

Murphy alerted the Seattle Department of Transportation to the problem, which sent a team to inspect them.

The trees are likely the victim of this year's unusually cold winter, Rundquist said in an email.

Rundquist said the trees are hardy in temperatures as low as 20 degrees, and Seattle experienced temperatures closer to 10 degrees this winter.

"This particular tree is marginal for our area," he said.

The trees would have been fine in a normal winter, Rundquist said.

He said the trees were pretty much an experiment by City Light to see how well they would fare. There are only 200 Arbutus trees city-wide out of 100,000 inventoried trees.

Though the experiment was fairly successful, in that most of the trees have survived for more than a decade, the city will probably replace the dead trees with a more proven species, Runquist said.