The Digitalisation of Tree Management aims to meet the challenges of managing Singapore’s greenery, which includes declining labour workforce, rising public expectation, urbanisation and climate change. NParks transformed its urban tree management through digitalisation to maintain Singapore as a City in a Garden and sustain a quality living environment for its residents.

In a study by MIT Senseable City Lab in 2017, Singapore was cited as the greenest city in the world. This was possible based on a rigorous regime of tree management and a spirit of continual innovation in greening. Below are some recent digitalisation initiatives:

A common geo-spatial platform & mobile field application was developed for arborists to access the geo-tagged urban trees and update the inspection & maintenance records. An online portal (trees.sg) was setup for the public to obtain trees information, tag photos, and email a tree, for public outreach & education. Other technologies adopted includes aerial drones to access hard-to-reach areas for tree inspection, statistical models to assess tree structural stability, and data analytics for tree risk assessment.

NParks is further developing a system to automatically extract the physical tree parameters from LiDAR scans to create spatially, semantically & biologically accurate 3D tree models. From this, many potential applications can be developed, which will fundamentally change the way we manage our trees. E.g. by significantly cutting down time to measure & collect these data, allowing modelling of a single tree & at a city scale level to glean insights to our tree management plans, performing landscape design through 3D visualisation, performing carbon accounting and quantification of greenery.

This transformation will bring about more efficient, effective and sustainable ways of managing trees in a city and show the way forward as cities increasingly turn to greening as a response to climate change.

https://www.nparks.gov.sg

• Singapore

Singapore is a model for sustainable greenery management for a city. Its trees management practices and digitalisation programmes can be replicated in other cities. The technologies used are generally available in the market and can be acquired by other cities.
Singapore regularly shares its knowledge on greenery and tree management through participation in international and regional forums, and bilateral consultations. The solutions developed through partnerships with research institutions and tech companies can also be made available to others through publication or commercialisation.

As cities around the world recognise the importance of greening their cities to mitigate the effects of climate change and improve liveability, the intensification of tree planting and corresponding efforts on tree management for their urban landscape is expected to grow significantly. Coupled with climatic changes like stronger winds and heavier rainfall, lapses in tree management would result in more tree falls and pose a threat to human lives and properties.

This underscores the importance and sustained demand of a robust operating model for urban tree management, to improve the safety of cities and combat the rising costs of arboriculture work. The urban tree management model adopted by Singapore is designed using a science-based approach to improve the productivity and effectiveness of tree management. By using modelling tools, NParks could perform risk-based assessment and reduce more than 50% of the tree inspection time.

To ensure sustained efforts in digitalisation, NParks invested in the training of its workforce in using the productivity tools, e.g. conducting flying training of microdrones for tree inspection, and weaving the application of tree structural structural stability assessment into its tree inspection processes.

For the development of the Remote Tree Management system, NParks partnered a commercial company to produce the system. This is done with sustainability in mind and in anticipation that the solution can be used by others to meet their challenges of tree management.

Industry NParks leads the transformation of the landscape industry, to develop the digital capabilities of local industry by sharing our plans and inviting industry players to partner us in pilots and implementations. We work with industry partners to promote digitalisation and mechanisation of tools and provide grants to local industry partners so that their operations could be more productive and less labour intensive. NParks’ Centre of Urban Greenery & Ecology (CUGE) offers professional skills training programmes and funding to support the industry in raising their skills, and investing in mechanisation and digitalisation. We also worked with schools to expose the students to the use of digitalisation and technology tobetter prepare them for the workforce. Public With the rich spatial data collected about our trees, we further shared these data with the public via trees.sg (an online tree portal) to create greater appreciation and understanding of the trees in Singapore. The portal allows the public to identify the trees around them and discover interesting facts about them. They can also interact virtually with the trees by writing emails to the trees and share photos of the trees with one another. This initiative will promote greater community ownership of the greenery around them.