Data-driven approach and management platform as the basis for the smart development of the urban tree canopy

Planting more trees in urban areas is a promising intervention for environmental improvement, but faces many problems, like scarcity of space, high costs and challenging conditions. Inconsiderate tree planting can result in unwanted effects.

Therefore, urban decision makers, planners, and other stakeholders need tools supporting evidence-based urban greening strategies.

The goal of Urban ElemenTREE is to compare different practices of planning urban green spaces and to build common ground across numerous disciplines and areas of expertise.

It will improve and standardise the current methods for tree-related environmental monitoring, modelling, and digital surveys.

This will make it faster, more accurate, and more efficient to investigate the complex interactions between trees and the urban built environment.

Urban Living Labs will be applied in five European cities characterised by different environmental and spatial conditions.

Finally, Urban ElemenTREE will deliver an on-line platform for the management of the urban tree canopy, providing digital models and comprehensive tree metrics to support practitioners in optimising urban planning using trees. The Urban Living Lab in Gothenburg focuses on the interplay of wind and trees.

Both wind risk analysis of urban trees and detailed simulations of the tree-wind interaction in urban environments will be carried out, the latter of which will be used to improve tree-models for coarse-scale simulations.