Valuing Green Infrastructure Through Tree Assessment TooLs (VITAL)

In recent years environmental and social scientists working with economists have begun to understand the value that nature provides to society. These 'ecosystem services' (ES) include things like the provisioning of food and fuel, regulating water quality and quantity, reducing pollution, storing carbon and producing landscapes and features of cultural and aesthetic significance. Using a range of widely agreed methods it has been possible to put economic values on these services and the stock of ES is referred to as 'natural capital'. These ideas have allowed nature to be included in the way that organisations and societies plan and make decisions. Economic development, for example, that erodes natural capital might be considered undesirable, especially if the loss of natural capital outweighs the benefit of the development. Another term, 'green infrastructure' (GI) is used to describe the natural or semi-natural features such as hedgerows, parkland and street trees that make up part of human landscapes. GI can provide ecosystem services and therefore adds to natural capital. Urban trees, for example, regulate water flow, take in carbon dioxide, can reduce air pollution and have cultural significance.
Although these ideas are well developed in theory, applying them in practice has proved more challenging because the data required to calculate ES valuations are not widely available and the methods used are complex. This is a barrier to governments and businesses understanding and using these important ideas in their planning and decision making, and more so for individual citizens, small organisations or community groups who might be interested in the real value of their environment.
The VITAL project is made up of environmental scientists from the Open University with experience of running large citizen science projects, specialists in ES and trees from Forest Research, and Treeconomics a social enterprise which has been instrumental in engaging organisations in valuing their trees. We aim to develop a system that allows anyone from individual citizens to local authorities, businesses and large organisations to value the trees around them. We will significantly improve an existing OU citizen science tool: 'Treezilla' which allows users to map and gives ES valuations of trees, so that it links with the most widely used professional system for ES tree valuation: i-Tree Eco. These improvements will give all users access to powerful tools for valuing trees. We will engineer these systems such that data from one feeds into the other, and as more data are collected in Treezilla, it is used to refine the system further.
The value of our tools will be in their use by large numbers of people and organisations, so we have partnered with key organisations with interests in the value of trees in their environment to deliver the project. We will work closely with the Parks Trust Milton Keynes who are responsible for GI in one of Britain's most wooded cities, to understand how organisations can use Treezilla, using what we learn to improve training and promotion of Treezilla to other users. We will then work closely with a major governmental organisation: Natural Resources Wales to deliver specific projects demonstrating the use of Treezilla to that organisation and others like it. Through a third partnership, with The Tree Council, which has tens of members made up of local authorities, community groups and small and large charities, and supports a national network of 8000 volunteer Tree Wardens, we will communicate our tools and what we have learned to a very large number of potential users. These, and all users of Treezilla, will have free and open access to tools for valuing trees and the same access to a massive and growing dataset of trees and tree valuations from across the UK.

The major outcomes of project VITAL will be:
1) Tools that meet the needs of organisations wishing to incorporate the value of trees into their decision making, and crucially, which can be used openly and interactively by those organisations' stakeholder communities.
2) A means for communicating the value of trees to stakeholders from business to governmental, third sector organisations, educational institutions and individuals.
3) Embedded knowledge of tools for tree valuation in key end user organisations.
Governmental, non-governmental and commercial organisations will benefit from the availability of easily accessible tools for ES valuation for their own internal planning and decision making as well as their communication with partners and stakeholders. Detailed knowledge of these tools and their use in our partner organisations will benefit them directly and provide models for other organisations to use these same tools.
The open nature of the Treezilla platform and its associated training and educational resources will give individuals and organisations in wider society access to a wealth of data on trees and their value as part of the environment and broaden the understanding of ES and their valuation as part of natural capital. This greater knowledge of these important concepts in society will facilitate the delivery of environmental policy and empower citizens to be more engaged in the way that decisions about the environment are made.
The project team, and stakeholders with an interest in the use of tree valuations will be able to chart the impact of project VITAL through the number of users (individual citizens and organisations) of the Treezilla platform, the number of individual tree entries and the outputs generated beyond the timeframe of this specific project.