United Kingdom

Trees as Infrastructure

NBS Type

  • Green space with trees

Challenges Adressed

  • Air pollution removal
  • Heat mitigation
  • Water quality mitigation
  • Water flow management
  • Carbon sequestration
  • Biodiversity
  • Other health and wellbeing

Funding options

  • Public - EU funding
  • Private - companies

Type of innovation

  • Economy

Name of organisation

Dark Matter Labs

Organisation type

Cooperative

Project status

Ongoing funding

About the project

Trees as infrastructure establishes nature as a critical part of urban infrastructure, alongside bridges, roads, and rail, enabling investment, profitability, and sustainability.

Innovative steps

TreesAI aims to support city-scale decision-making for green infrastructure by bridging science, technology, and civic participation. State-of-the-art machine learning methods are employed to detect trees from 2D or 3D image data, recognize species and observe growth.

Technical specification

A novel Scenario Analysis Framework (SAF) is developed to design and forecast green infrastructure portfolios and their impacts (50+ years), under varying weather trajectories, maintenance regimes, species compositions, spatial distribution, exposure to disease, etc. The framework is based on an agent-based modeling and simulation paradigm, enabling to embed a green infrastructure portfolio within the economic and social configurations of a city.