Recently, the OpenTreeMap team has had the privilege to talk with Mihalis Papakonstantinou and Dr. Grigorios Varras from Urban Tree Management (UTM), an urban forestry project in Greece. Urban Tree Management uses some of OpenTreeMap’s open source code in their project to map urban trees in the region of Epirus. So far, over 8,000 trees have been documented in four cities! Knowing that urban forestry projects face many of the same challenges, I asked Urban Tree Management to share some insight into their success and tell us about their plans for the future.
Karissa: Tell me about how you became part of the Urban Tree Management team.
UTM: Dr. Grigorios Varras (Associate Professor, Technological Educational Institution of Epirus, Dept. of Agricultural Technology, Unit Floriculture & Landscape Architecture), who is the academic responsible of Urban Tree Management, is the one that had the idea in the first place. He has been exploring new techniques for urban forestry and its influence on the local environment and as a result came up with the idea of Urban Tree Management.
Karissa: And why did Urban Tree Management get started?
UTM: This program was based on the idea that green spaces are essential to the urban ecosystem, because trees, parks, urban and peri-urban woods can mitigate temperature, decrease pollution, water run-off and soil erosion, increase aesthetics and quality of places, provide a place for recreation, education and learning. Trees can also contribute by direct and indirect ways to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere and contrast ‘urban heat island’. In order to improve urban landscape using urban forestry, show to the people living in an urban environment its importance, and applying research work in the field, the Urban Tree Management proposal was formed.
Karissa: What is the urban forestry community like in Greece? How is public awareness of urban forestry issues?
UTM: Urban forestry is practiced usually from foresters-environmentalists, agriculturists, engineers, etc working either in public services such as Green Bureau in Prefecture, in Community etc or in private Bureaus, such as private Consulting Bureaus, landscape architects, environmental research groups, etc. There is also an increasing number of individuals, in the areas of biology, meteorology, and geology over the last years, that tend to practice urban forestry techniques. Also a large part of the Greek urban forestry community consists of Universities, and researchers, like the Urban Tree Management team.
There is a continuously increasing environmental awareness, yet still low, of urban forestry issues either from the local and regional government or from central governance in combination to European Union directives and standards about the well-being of the citizens and the protection of the environment. Generally Greek people and authorities are starting to realize the importance of urban green infrastructures but financing for projects and research on this issue is low.
Karissa: What challenges did you face when starting Urban Tree Management?
UTM: Challenges faced were:
- The people’s awareness that was not that high
- Technical problems to be resolved such as the deficit in rural internet in the research sites
- Field-data acquisition
- Compatibility and combination of various technologies that were used as part of the project
Karissa: What aspects of the project are going well for you, and why do you think this is?
UTM: The project consists of 2 main parts, one of them is the documentation of trees for each of the 4 big cities of Epirus: Arta, Igoumenitsa, Ioannina and Preveza. Besides the geospatial characteristics of each tree, there is a number of data that is stored in our inventory, including height, diameter, stability, etc
The second part of our project is the 12 interactive microclimate maps, for each city that quantify the impact of green areas on the city microclimate. These maps show the values of 6 environmental indicators throughout each of these cities.
We believe that the above data that is stored and shown to the public are the main reason behind its success. Our web based system has shown the public the huge impact of urban forestry and as a result increased awareness and interest of citizens in the importance of green infrastructure in an urban environment.
Karissa: Are you facing any new challenges now?
UTM: The web-based platform can be used from policy-makers aiming to decide on the proper measures for the management of urban green infrastructure in the interests of public health, quality of life and well-being of the population, so what need to be done is that we need to expand our audience and target-group and to apply our platform to other cities aiming to optimum management of their urban green zones.
Also another challenge that we are facing, has to do with public awareness, which we are trying to increase, in every way we can through our web platform (leave your message initiative, qr codes to be deployed throughout the city).
Karissa: What are your goals for the future?
UTM: We would like to announce our product to various cities/regions and to teach them how to prepare a tree-registry aiming to incorporate it in our software and finally acquire their own urban tree management system.
We are also on the way of announcing our offline tree inventory app, through which documenting trees will be made much easier.
Karissa: What are your recommendations for someone interested in starting a similar project?
UTM: It is important to set up a team of experts in various disciplines to obtain a total knowledge of the issue, such as environmentalists, foresters, engineers, IT experts, biologists, meteorologists, etc. because the urban tree management issue is a multi-disciplinary topic and it requires a lot of specialized knowledge and expertise.
You can contact Mihalis and Dr. Varras via email at [email protected] and [email protected] to learn more about the Urban Tree Management project.
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