Dr Philip Wheeler

Urban Trees are amongst the most versatile natural assets that can be used to cost effectively raise the quality of Welsh towns and cities. However most recent studies show that 73% of urban areas in Wales have lost trees since 2010 and between 2006 and 2013 7,000 trees were lost, which suggests an ongoing erosion of Wales' Victorian and Edwardian tree legacy. This project, led by the Women's Institute (WI) in Wales, in collaboration with partners including the OU through Treezilla - the Monster Map of Trees (www.treezilla.org), seeks to play a part in helping to reverse this decline. With its large, locally connected membership, the WI will participate in assessing the state of urban trees, by promoting active management, providing eyes and ears for public bodies and taking action to safeguard this incredibly valuable natural heritage. Using tools including Treezilla, they will survey, observe, preserve, protect and engage communities in tree-planting and on-going monitoring and maintenance, and spread the word about the value of trees to the wider public. They will also provide some of the ‘ground-truthing’ required and feed useful information back to such public bodies such as Natural Resources Wales and Local Authority planning departments, to inform their policies and plans, and to ensure that this natural heritage is protected and prospers for the future health, wellbeing and safety of communities and generations to come.

This project brings together an inclusive leadership team that includes leading researchers in urban forestry, citizen science and engaged research to co-create a proposal for the development and implementation of TreeLab: a framework and delivery programme for an engaged, and collaborative world-class urban tree research project that will co-produce an evidence base for urban tree management. We will co-create the TreeLab concept through TreeLab:MK, using the city of Milton Keynes and engaging its communities of tree managers, publics and researchers in the development of a place-based nationally and internationally relevant research programme for phase 2 of this call.

In overview, the proposed Project will construct a Research Plan comprising two work areas with the following scope: Work Area 1: Canopy Cover and Trend Analysis WA 1.1: Canopy cover mapping: historic WA 1.2: Image-based tree mapping: historic and contemporary, including verification of remotely sensed (RS) data WA 1.3: Integration of tree maps for geospatial and trend analysis Work Area 2: Understanding and Valuating Change WA 2.1: Reasons for change WA 2.2: Valuing canopy cover change

Urban trees contribute many valuable things to society. Some of these, like carbon storage, are relatively easy to measure and assign a value to, while others, such as cultural or historical value, are less tangible. The Branching Out project is a major interdisciplinary project led by Loughborough University and including the Open University, University of York and Forest Research that will investigate a wide range of social and cultural values of urban trees. The project will use participatory methods to understand what diverse communities value about urban trees and map these values across urban areas using citizen science and the latest satellite imagery analysis methods. By working with urban tree managers we will be able to improve the management of urban forests to maximise their benefits to society.

We will combine measurements across scales from ground-level, UAV and airborne platforms of urban and woodland environments. Using high-resolution imaging and non-imaging spectroscopy we will develop training data for the identification and physiological characterisation of tree species in both urban and non-urban environments. The ultimate goal is to develop an approach that can be applied to emerging very high resolution satellite platforms for monitoring trees and forests from space.

Tree and forest climate interactions are fundamental to a sustainable future and societal wellbeing. Trees are at the heart of the current political discourse, and the UK government is preparing to launch a strategy to accelerate tree planting and improve the management of existing trees and woodlands. The world is becoming increasingly urbanised, and urban trees are well recognised for their environmental, health and wellbeing benefits. Trees across the rural and urban landscape are going to play a central role as we move towards a net-zero emissions economy. The ability to measure, monitor and map the health and status of the UK’s trees is therefore essential to the UK’s future treescape and urban green infrastructure. Currently, tree identification can be achieved with high spatial resolution panchromatic imagery, but we need to go beyond this. We need to be able to not only map species within mixed assemblages, but also characterise the health and size of the trees. Furthermore, we need to be able to measure the particular configurations of urban environments and the small-scale but widespread plantings that are likely to feature prominently in planting programmes. Importantly, we need to be able to monitor changes over time – to quantify carbon sequestration; assess vulnerability and detect the onset of climatic stress or disease outbreak to facilitate early intervention; and to measure the success and monitor compliance of tree planting programmes. This requires going to the spatial scale of tree crowns but capturing the spectral information that will provide the information for classification and characterisation. Advances in both sensors and process understanding is closing the gap between canopy reflectance properties and its functional meaning, opening the possibility of detailed studies at the scale of individual trees and their responses to global change from space. Species identification and mapping has been demonstrated from airborne hyperspectral sensors, enabling species mapping across forests and urban areas. In this project we will push the limits of leading CMOS TDI sensors and optimise system configuration to develop a new platform for the classification, characterisation and monitoring of trees across urban and rural landscapes. Band selection will provide information on both plant health and will feed into classification algorithms developed from extensive ground truthing data. In this pathfinder phase of the project, our objectives are to (could include): 1. Refine band selection based on key vegetation characterisation indices and sensor constraints (from starting point of bands a,b,..f) 2. Develop classification algorithms from airborne hyperspectral data and extensive ground-truthing data sets. 3. Collect new airborne data specifically for one target market: railways 4. Produce the system requirements document for TreeView 5. Produce the mission requirements document for TreeView 6. Perform market analysis of end users across local and national government, commercial and research sectors

Trees provide a wide range of ecosystem services including provision of wood and timber, regulation of water quality and quantity, carbon sequestration and storage, and cooling local air temperatures, mitigating air pollution, supporting biodiversity, as well as their cultural and public and amenity values. They are a vital component of green infrastructure. Services provided by forest ecosystems are well documented, and a number of tools - including the OU's citizen science based tree mapping Treezilla (www.treezilla.org and i-Tree (www.itreetools.org ) - have been developed to help assess the value of trees in urban environments to support the advocacy of trees in towns and cities, as well as to encourage budgetary support in the maintenance and expansion of urban forests. This project aims to develop these systems with a focus on Treezilla to provide better UK-based data. Our goal is to deliver a platform for valuing trees usable by ordinary citizens, environmental and planning professionals which leads to a broader understanding of the value of green infrastructure to society and which promotes investment and support for green infrastructure amongst individual citizens and organisations.