The City of Denton is cataloging all its trees throughout the city through a partnership with ‘greehill’ — a technology company “leading nature-based smart city solutions.”
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, Denton has become one of the first U.S. cities to take stock of its public trees using scanning technology from greehill.
Haywood Morgan, urban forester for the City of Denton Parks and Recreation Department, told The Dallas Express in an email that the city signed a one-year, $210,000 contract with greehill that can be extended by up to four additional years.
“This include[s] two scans of maintained areas of parks, City properties, and public rights-of-way and inventorying up to 40,000 trees in those areas,” said Morgan. “This amount is comparable to a manual tree inventory.”
Furthermore, Morgan told The Dallas Express one of his “primary objectives when [he] came to the City of Denton in 2014 was to develop a comprehensive Urban Forestry Program to raise the standard of tree care and quality of life in the City.”
He said a complete inventory of public trees is needed to accomplish this goal.
“In the spring of 2022, I received a call from a Greehill representative requesting an audience to present Greehill’s tree inventory system using ground base LiDAR,” he wrote.
LiDAR, or “light detection and ranging,” is an “active remote sensing system that can be used to measure vegetation height across wide areas.”
Morgan said he “set up a meeting here in Denton and invited a few other cities to see what greehill had to offer … [and] went from skeptical of this new method of inventorying trees to believing in what they had to offer.”
He explained this process allows the city to collect data like the number of each type of tree, the tree’s size, and their biological information.
“One of the primary benefits of this method is a significant reduction in the time to complete the inventory, weeks as opposed to months or years, by driving by the trees versus walking the parks and manually measuring and assessing each individual tree,” Morgan said.
While the technology can narrow trees down to their genus, he noted that it does not get as specific as identifying their species, clarifying, “In other words, they can tell us if it’s an oak but not a post oak or red oak.”
A press release from the City of Denton said this survey, with the help of artificial intelligence, “will provide a three-dimensional digital twin of each tree, including, tree diameter, crown height, species, tree condition, and location.”
“Additionally, the survey will provide each tree with a unique ID number and calculate its economic value,” according to the city.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, the City of Denton plans to finish taking inventory of its trees by September.
The Dallas Express reached out to greehill for more information but received no response by press time.
