Recipient Organization
AZAVEA, INC.
340 NORTH 12TH STREET, SUITE 402
PHILADELPHIA,PA 19107
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
Air quality and stormwater runoff are two of the primary environmental challenges facing our cities. Creation and maintenance of a healthy urban forest is an important factor reducing water runoff and improving air qualityl The reduction in stormwater runoff and energy consumption facilitated by street trees not only provides quality of life benefits for urban citizens, but financial benefits as well. The City of New York has calculated a $36 million annual financial benefit in stormwater runoff reduction and related water quality improvements through its effective management of more than 500,000 street trees. In addition, the average electricity and natural gas cost savings in New York City facilitated by summer shade and winter windbreak provided by a healthy urban canopy are $47 per street tree, which equates to an annual benefit of $27.8 million. Despite their importance, most cities do not have the resources necessary to inventory and maintain the forest they have an struggle with meeting goals for planting new trees. However, they have passionate citizens and non-profit organizations interested in the maintenance of the urban forest. The research will focus on the feasibility of a prototype tree inventory system that will enable multiple participants from a wide variety of government and non-government groups to collaboratively and efficiently detail and map the urban street tree population for a given municipality. Using the OpenStreetMap project as a model and the City of Philadelphia as our test location, the project team will create OpenTreeMap, a collaborative web-based tree inventory software. The project will address challenges related to data quality, user validation, assignment of roles and trust. The project team will include not only software engineers but also urban forestry experts from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
Our Phase I SBIR effort will focus on the feasibility of a prototype tree inventory system that will enable multiple participants from a wide variety of government and non-government groups to collaboratively and efficiently detail and map the urban street tree population for a given municipality. We will use the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as our test location for our OpenTreeMap collaborative tree inventory application. Philadelphia is typical in many ways of large cities across the United States, since it has no viable tree inventory system in place, and maintenance of its existing tree population is spread across multiple government, nonprofit and citizen organizations. Our Phase I technical objectives will focus on several tasks and questions of feasibility including: 1) Can a geographic database back-end support web-based viewing, input and editing of tree related data by multiple users in diverse locations on a real-time basis The first technical objective will include designing and implementing a geographic database back-end that will be the foundation of the application, an interface to allow users to view information stored in the database, and an interface for users to input information into the system. 2.) What project roles will need to be established and what will each role entail 3.) How will the interface need to be adapted so that users will continue to maintain and update tree related data once an initial inventory has been performed The final question is whether the intended audience will have enough ongoing interest to keep all of the data complete, clean, and up-to-date. What can we do to make the interface attractive enough to governments, nonprofits and the general public to keep them coming back and encourage them to be involved
Project Methods
Avencia's proposed Phase I development project will test the feasibility of building a web-based software tool with a map-based user interface that will harness the environmental and community passion of citizens, non-profits, arborists, students, municipal workers and other stakeholders in urban communities, and enable them to develop and maintain an effective street tree inventory through a wiki-inspired collaborative geospatial database. The project team will attempt to model the urban tree inventory system on the OpenStreetMap.org (OSM) project used to create a global map of the planet. The team will test feasibility of several important features including: database design, user roles, data quality and user interface. First, the team will need to determine if the open-ended folksonomy and simple data structures employed by OSM will be adaptable to the requirements of foresters, where more contingent and structured databases may be required. The second and perhaps greatest challenge will lie with the degree to which the data entered by citizen volunteers and disparate non-profit organizations can be integrated and maintained as a coherent and useful database. Finally, the project team will need to develop a compelling and easy-to-use user interface adapted to the needs of tree inventory and search. The project team will integrate test data from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, the City of Philadelphia and other organizations. This core "starter" database will be the basis for functionality related to displaying the data. Additional modules will be implemented to manage roles, authentication and security as well as a data mining system to search for data quality problems. The software will be field-tested with local tree organizations under the aegis of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.