The City of Denton is taking inventory of all its trees to streamline tree maintenance and the spending of taxpayer dollars for tree-related services.
Denton has become one of the first American cities to catalog its trees through a partnership with greehill — a technology company “leading nature-based smart city solutions.”
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, Dallas recently won a “Smart Cities” award for one of its taxpayer-funded initiatives. The City has been pushing a number of different smart tech applications, including the expanded use of drones and unmanned aerial surveillance, despite potential privacy concerns. It is currently working to add AI-equipped cameras that can detect gunshots and collect data on the city.
It is unclear whether Dallas is considering a forestry application for “smart city solutions.”
For its part, the City of Denton is collecting tree data to make caring for trees more efficient in terms of projecting budgets, devising work schedules, and designating which areas must be pruned, according to Denton Urban Forester Haywood Morgan Jr.
The smart tech company uses lidar lasers to scan trees on City-owned properties, such as parks, medians, and roadsides. The scans document each tree’s health, structure, genus, economic value, and ecological benefit.
“We’re able to do an inventory in a fraction of the time that it would take to do a regular … boots-on-the-ground tree inventory,” Morgan told KERA News. “One person would go up and take a measurement of the tree and the other person’s taking notes and they would manually assess the tree for its height, its health conditions.”
Artificial intelligence uses the data to create digital copies of each tree. According to Morgan, the City of Denton will then be able to manage and track each tree individually.
Denton has roughly 24,000 trees near roads. Morgan said he does not know how many trees the city has throughout its parks, but that greehill’s analysis will provide an exact quantity.
“If someone calls or someone says ‘Oh, the trees need to be pruned here,’ or ‘when was the last time,’ we’ll be able to answer those questions without having to dig through paper files, or even Excel spreadsheets,” Morgan told KERA. “We can go to that individual tree and look at what was done and when it was done and who did the work.”
The City of Denton will reportedly finish taking inventory of its trees by September and will conduct the same analysis again in three years to monitor progress.
The Dallas Express reached out to both greehill and the City of Denton for more information about the tree inventory initiative but received no response by press time.
