TDWG 2021 : Urban Forestry Data Management

It is now well known that a healthy urban ecosystem is a crucial element to healthier citizens, better air and water quality, and overall, to a more resilient urban environment.

In this context, Natural Solutions, a company supporting biodiversity experts in their digital projects, has taken an interest in urban ecosystems and we asked ourselves 3 questions:

• How to face the climate crisis?

• How to make cities more attractive to citizens?

• How can we mobilise citizens and make them actors of greener cities?

For us, it was obvious that technology must help us to better understand biodiversity in the city in order to better preserve it.

So we are collecting all possible tree data to create an open map.

• There is Open Data, inspired by Steve Bennett's work on OpenTrees and data available on the Open Street Map platform. We teamed with the French government to build an open standard for tree data to improve the interoperability of the system.

• We also participate in the creation of new data. We made a participatory inventory to complete the Open Street Map data.  

• We are also using artificial intelligence to move forward even faster with tests made with the Deep Forest python package.

By assembling all this data on the ecoTeka map, we are helping to raise awareness of this biodiversity by increasing the population's level of awareness.

ecoTeka is also a community of actors - green space managers, landscapers and arborists - who have co-created a professional Open-Source tree management tool to better equip themselves and improve their urban forestry practices. The objective is to save time and to be more precise in the management by following the trees individually or in groups of trees. 

At last, there is another part of the ecoTeka project that is more research and development oriented to imagine the green cities of tomorrow. With all this data on trees in the city, we can learn more about the ecosystem services provided by trees and quantify them. I also invite you to look at the "Arbre en ville" project.  We are currently working on a recommendation tool to create urban green corridors to connect the different green patches identified from tree’s inventory.

In conclusion, ecoTeka is an ambitious project to better understand and manage urban ecosystems. This project is Open Source and promote the use of Open Data. We really want to succeed in bringing people together around this topic and continue to imagine this platform with you!

Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.