Remote Sensing Technology for The Identification and Classifiation or Urban Trees

UN projections show that by 2050, nearly 70% of the world's population is expected to live in urban
areas; over 80% of the UK population is already urban. The health and wellbeing of this increasing
urban population is a key global challenge of the 21st century. Urban trees are a critical component
of urban green infrastructure that contribute to the health and wellbeing of the urban population
through their role in, for example, mitigating climate change impacts and pollution reduction.
Information on the species, size and health of urban trees is necessary for local authorities to
manage their green infrastructure and associated ecosystem service provision. However, this
information is lacking for most local authorities, and the scale of the challenge of collecting the data
on the ground, and keeping it current, is beyond the resources of increasingly constrained budgets.
Tools for remotely collecting this information will prove invaluable to local governments in the UK,
with potential application further afield