Urban forests. Tree inventory

Urban forests, parks, and trees are significant elements of urban landscape.  They play an important role in urban ecosystems: cooling, wind control, humidity control, air pollution protection, landslide and soil erosion protection.  Trees and shrubs provide aesthetic enjoyment and create a pleasant environment for different outdoor activities. The leaves can take up aerosols, dust and many pollutants, e.g. sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone.

A tree inventory is the gathering of geo-located information about trees, their species, size, health, and site conditions in an urbanized community. Collected data are used for urban forest management and tree ordinance. Street trees are an important way of making a city cleaner and greener.

There are several approaches to conduct a tree inventory, from the “windshield survey” to the full-size projects encompassing the whole city or community and conducted by professional surveyors, arborists, and geographers. Communities with limited budgets (as well as resilient communities in the USA) often involve volunteers to survey all trees along the streets and public places. It saves a lot of money, but inexperienced stuff is not able to identify all tree species or assess tree conditions. Besides, collected data may be inconsistent and biased. 

Zesmill provides professional surveying and arborist services, including:

• interpretation of aerial and satellite images
• park and street tree surveys which implicates geo-locating and collection of arboristic data such as species, height, diameter class, tree condition, removal needs
• identifying tree species including rare ones
• survey of riparian areas and wetlands
• assessment of roadside, pollution isolation, and windbreak forests
• recording the trees located on private land using satellite images of 30-50 cm resolution, or aerial images; these plants make up a large percentage of the entire urban tree stands
• computing the tree population and its growth and mortality rates, tree density indices, differences in growth parameters depending on forest location
• detailed mapping of parks, gardens, riparian areas at a scale 1:500-1:2000
• detecting the illegal waste disposal sites, abandoned and vacant land

Key advantages of tree inventory with Zesmill:

• tree location accuracy
• land use map and master plan compatibility
• professional arborist
• cost effective approach — prices start from USD 450/hectare for residential areas, from USD 1,150/hectare for parklands.

For the biggest urban forests we use aerial and LIDAR imaging which are not so cost effective, but allow for encompassing large areas and extracting forest inventory parameters directly from point cloud database. We apply state-of-the-art voxel processing software to estimate above ground volume for a tree and maps stem locations.