Digital forestry team combines AI with satellite data to monitor urban trees
Digital forestry team combines AI with satellite data to monitor urban trees
Publish Date: 2026-02-17 09:50:00
Source Domain: www.purdue.edu
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Rapid Urban Tree Mapping: Purdue University’s digital forestry team has developed an innovative AI-enhanced method that identifies the locations of individual trees in urban areas at a speed previously unattainable, processing 280 million trees across 330 U.S. cities.
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Accurate and Cost-effective: The method provides precise data on tree distribution (within 1.5 meters) at significantly lower costs compared to traditional volunteer-based tree inventories, offering detailed insights useful for city planning and disaster management.
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Historical Data Utilization: The system leverages 15 years of historical satellite data from the PlanetScope constellation to track changes over time, enabling before-and-after analyses of events such as forest fires.
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Urban Planning Impact: The detailed tree inventories created by the new tool facilitate better urban planning by understanding tree density’s impact on local climate (urban heat island effect) and wildfire risk, helping improve city environments.
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Methodological Contribution: The research introduces a new generative visual computing method, which combines deep learning, computer vision, and image processing to accurately predict tree distribution based on learned spatial rules from urban areas.
