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Plymouth using innovative imaging system to map 40K trees
The City of Plymouth is using new technology to map the 40,000 trees in the area.
PLYMOUTH, Minn. (FOX 9) - The truck that Conor Nolan is spending a couple weeks driving along the streets of Plymouth gets attention for a couple of reasons.
One is the six-camera array on top, which people confuse for a Google car. The other is his speed.
"We can only go a maximum of 23 miles an hour while collecting," Nolan explains.
While the cameras get a full panoramic view, it’s the two LIDAR sensors that are doing the work of creating a full digital copy of every tree he drives by.
"It’s collecting a point cloud of the tree," he says, "so that’s a 3-D model at the end."
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City of Plymouth using new technology for tree mapping
The City of Plymouth is using new technology for tree mapping. FOX 9's Rob Olson has the story.
Creating a virtual tree map
What we know:
Plymouth is the first city in Minnesota to create this virtual tree inventory, signing a contract with two companies, Greehill and Davey Resource Group, to do the mapping and the data processing.
"For years we’ve had an inventory that we’ve known was incomplete," said Paul Buck, the city’s forester.
Cities have always kept inventories of their trees, but it’s done by crews driving around and writing them down. Some get missed, some might be misidentified, and that makes caring for them all more tedious.
"If you want to be efficient, you want to know what you have," Buck said
Once this high-tech mapping is complete, they’ll know exactly what trees are where. But more importantly, they can see exactly what condition they’re in, both shape and size, that can focus their attention.
"We can narrow it down to this 10%, or 20%, we should go look at those first because there’s something off about those trees," said Buck. "It might not tell us exactly what it is, but it at least narrows down the numbers…to go look on our own and say what is wrong? Should we address it right away?"
Cameras and lasers
How it works:
The scanning is done by Greehill Smart Tree Inventory out of Texas, mapping about 40 miles of city streets each day. The rest of the work is up to Davey Resource Group, which crunches it all through their software system.
Jacob McMains showed FOX 9 a map of another city they completed recently, demonstrating the variety of ways to search through the inventory. For example, he selected a species of tree and the program immediately displayed how many there are and where to find them.
"The power of the data is that it essentially allows you through a bunch of objective metrics," McMains explained, "to flag trees that look abnormal when compared to the rest of the data set."
And for each tree, there is a 3D model, which can quickly flag problems that humans might otherwise miss.
"Maybe there’s some die-back in the crown, you can see exactly where that’s located. Maybe there’s some dead wood you want to direct a pruning crew to go and address," McMains said.
A four-year project
What's next:
This is a four-year project for Plymouth, which includes getting a second scan done in a couple of years, which Buck says will be a test of how effective this approach is.
It will tell them, by comparison, if the problems identified now have improved when it’s scanned again.
"These are green assets," he says. "They’re increasing in value every day they’re here. To ignore them or lose track of them means we’re losing the opportunity to make them better."