Hello Trees: a digital tool to share and collect dynamic information on urban trees

Background/Question/Methods

Trees are a critical part of urban landscapes, providing aesthetic benefits and ecosystem services. However, trees also represent a risk to infrastructure and property (e.g., via limb loss or bole collapse). Often, the tipping point between net positive or negative ecosystem (dis)services is based on tree health. For this reason, cities across North America are invested in inventorying urban forest canopy and estimating health and ecosystem services. Many of these efforts, however, provide only a snapshot of dynamic processes, and are quickly outdated, especially as anthropogenic climate change and rapid urbanization drive dramatic changes in urban forests. The solution to this is to develop tools that can provide dynamic and up-to-date urban forest information. Hello Trees is a demonstration project, in Portland, Oregon, of a digital tool designed to share data on urban trees (related to natural history, health, and benefits), while engaging users to contribute real-time observations, to update and validate a dynamic city-wide tree health database. The tool integrates recent environmental data from satellite platforms and distributed sensor networks with publicly available municipal tree inventory databases into a creative and engaging user interface to both share existing and collect new urban tree data.

Results/Conclusions

The Hello Trees demonstration project is designed to encourage information and knowledge transfer between local urban forest researchers, private industry, the general public and urban forest managers/policy makers that all share a vested interest in urban forest health. The platform is built on a novel integration of available datasets to illuminate the ecosystem benefits and infrastructure impacts of individual trees. The Hello Trees tool allows users to view, manipulate, and learn from local environmental data, satellite-based imagery, recent tree inventory data, and dynamic tree health information. The tool also includes a two-way, AI-enabled conversational interface that allows users to “talk” to trees, providing both a unique and engaging educational experience, and the opportunity for researchers to collect up-to-date tree health information and gain insight into people’s relationships with urban trees. The Hello Trees platform provides a unique educational/science outreach tool that reveals a more detailed and accessible view of urban ecosystem function, while also collecting valuable citizen-science data to establish a dynamic picture of the urban forest for researchers and decision-makers alike. Tools like this are needed to facilitate stakeholder-engaged and community-oriented decisions regarding the future of urban forests in US cities.