How to plant urban trees to improve local environmental conditions and make then thrive?

Planting more trees in urban areas is a promising intervention for environmental improvement and for providing ecosystem services. However, it faces many limitations related to the scarcity of space, high costs, and the often challenging conditions reducing the longevity of trees. Moreover, inconsiderate tree planting might produce unwanted effects. Therefore, urban decision makers, planners, and other stakeholders are in need of tools supporting evidence-based urban greening strategies. Urban ElemenTREE aims to advance more sustainable tree planting in cities, for more regenerative urban neighbourhoods, by formulating a systematic, integrated, evidence-based approach for the smart development of the urban tree canopy.

Urban ElemenTREE aims to make it more accessible and efficient to study the tree-environment interaction as a basis for more tailored tree planting.

Urban ElemenTREE takes the latest promising, yet fragmented research on urban trees, including the considerations of air pollution, wind risk, lighting conditions, heat stress, or contamination, and translate it into actionable guidance for stakeholders, planners, and decision-makers. A variety of emerging methods and novel techniques is applied (ground- and UAV-based low-cost sensing, performance-driven simulations, street-view-based estimations etc., supported by spatial and landscape analysis and citizen science, and benchmarked against high-end methods (laboratory analyses, high resolution LiDAR and high-end simulations) to improve their reliability.

Transdisciplinary research is bridged with innovation and practical solutions for policy-making, planning, and designing processes, harnessing the power of digitisation.