Highlights from the second coordination meeting of 100KTREEs (12-month meeting)
The partners of 100KTREEs met online on December 13th and 14th for the usual six-monthly progress meeting. The first day, in the presence of a EC project officer and an external expert, was focused on the updating of the activities carried out by each work package in the last semester of the project, together with a work plan for the next 6 months. The second day was more specifically dedicated to a technical discussion about the implementation aspects of the toolbox.
During the progress meeting it was emphasized the effort by the project to interact with cities and stakeholders in order to co-create the most relevant use cases for tree planting. This was accomplished in the first project year through a different series of activities such as the collection of user stories and the co-creation workshops with local stakeholders communities, with the scope to collect user requirements and raise awareness on the project topics. In 100KTREEs the engagement of stakeholders is considered a crucial aspects as well as the technological implementation. Building knowledge around 100KTREEs and establishing an informed and active community of stakeholders is a fundamental assumption to have an effective exploitation of the key project results and to stimulate city administration in finding alternative financial means to support the tree planting strategies. To support this, the project needs for a good strategy of communication and dissemination to be implemented both at city and EU level that implies also the promotion of a 100KTREEs brand and the connection with other EU initiatives in space /downstream sector and trees planting.
Concerning technological aspects, the project aims to explore and develop mapping resources and tree detection tools based on Copernicus data, in order to provide the base mapping for tree cover/air quality/flooding/urban heat island for the two pilot cities of Copenhagen and Sofia. On the one hand, 100KTREEs works to define attributes for a city tree with the scope to standardize tree types to be used for modelling purposes, on the other hand the project aims at estimating the impact of future urban tree planting scenarios, their impact on eco-system services and simulated using a suite of optimized models and tool.
As already said, in the first project year a lot of resources were dedicated to collect user requirements. In order of importance, priorities for the toolbox features were revealed as is follows:
- to know the location of areas where potentially planting new trees and to have a socio-economic evalutation of the impacts from planting trees
- to analyse the cost-benefit for the city
- to support maintenance and planning green areas
- to know impacts on prices for real estates from planting trees
- to monitor the state and health of planted areas
The possibility to simulate scenarios over the next 20/30 years as a function of climate changes is among the requested services for a toolbox, together with the socio-economic modelling.
Data availability, resolution and reliability is a central issue for 100KTREEs services and modelling tools. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms are used to implement tools for automatic trees detection starting from ground based and satellite Copernicus data. Citizen science data and data from in-situ monitoring are used to enhance and validate the information on trees.
The scope is to implement a system that runs with standard data availabe at regional and EU level and hence with high potential of scalability and replicability in different geographical and city contexts.
