Space Apps Challenge 2018

Not only are trees essential for life, but as the longest living species on earth, they give us a link between the past, present and future.

Problem statement: With growing population, cities expand respectfully, facing problems with city planning and landscaping. As not every city can provide enough resources to determine and solve landscaping problems, we want to make work for landscapers easier and make information more accessible for everyone. Communities will be able to take the initiative on making their streets greener and healthier to live.

Trees benefits: Trees absorb carbon dioxide as they grow and the carbon that they store in their wood helps slow the rate of global warming. They reduce wind speeds and cool the air as they lose moisture and reflect heat upwards from their leaves. It’s estimated that trees can reduce the temperature in a city by up to 7°C. Trees also help prevent flooding and soil erosion, absorbing thousands of litres of stormwater.

Trees host complex microhabitats. When young, they offer habitation and food to amazing communities of birds, insects, lichen and fungi. When ancient, their trunks also provide the hollow cover needed by species such as bats, woodboring beetles, tawny owls and woodpeckers. One mature oak can be home to as many as 500 different species.

Trees strengthen the distinctive character of a place and encourage local pride. Urban woodland can be used as an educational resource and to bring groups together for activities like walking and bird-watching. Trees are also invaluable for children to play in and discover their sense of adventure. People are attracted to live, work and invest in green surroundings. Research shows that average house prices are 5-18% higher when properties are close to mature trees. Companies benefit from a healthier, happier workforce if there are parks and trees nearby.

For every dollar invested in management, benefits returned annually ranged from $1.37 to $3.09. Strategies each city can take to increase net benefits are presented.

Solution: to solve this problem we created out application: website and REST API which can be used to get information about landscaping level for chosen city. Also it is possible to see landscaping level for different parts of chosen city on the map. Our app calculates percentage of green zones in chosen city, count approximate numbers of trees in the city, calculate income that can be obtained from these trees. By income we understand monetary equivalent of resources, which trees give us:air purification, microfiber absorption, thermoregulation, shadow creation and others.

Our application also classifies city zones into 4 classes: rich green zones: forests and parks; medium green zones: parks and trees in the city; poor green zones: urban zones with shrubs and short trees; very poor green zones: urban zones without trees and shrubs.

Data: for this application we use Landsat 8 raster images data: RGB images with 15 m resolution, MODIS raster images with NDVI(Normalized difference vegetation index) band and 120 m resolution, and vector city borders data got from OpenStreetMap repository.

Technologies: core application is created with Python programming language and geoprocessing Python libraries: Geopandas, GDAL and others, OpenCV library for image processing and computer vision; REST API is created with Flask library; website for results visualisation is created using JavaScript, jQuery and HTML, CSS.

References:

Profit from trees https://academic.oup.com/jof/article/103/8/411/4598681

Github: https://github.com/VitaliiKinakh/make-cities-green-again

Link: https://mcga.herokuapp.com