Using Remote Sensing to Inform Valuation of Urban Treescapes in the UK Beyond Hard Ecosystem Service Provision

Urban trees provide a range of environmental, aesthetic, recreational and cultural benefits, and in some cases, disbenefits. This poses a challenge in capturing and representing the various human values associated with them. The Branching Out project seeks to develop a valuation approach for trees in the urban environment that incorporates cultural and social values of the wider community. The project focuses on the task of assigning value to tree assets at scale, incorporating the diverse and subjective perspectives that communities hold. The study develops methodologies that account for the ways in which individuals and communities perceive, appreciate, and derive value from urban trees, ultimately contributing to more comprehensive and inclusive approaches to urban tree valuation. To provide valuation at scale, a remote sensing methodology was developed, using 30cm aerial hyperspectral and 7cm resolution broadband imaging data. These data were captured over three target cities in the UK (York, Cardiff and Milton Keynes), representing a range of urban landscapes from historic city (York) to 20th Century `Garden City (Milton Keynes). A targeted sampling approach was used to complete ground biophysical surveys of all trees within 1 ha quadrats across each of the cities. Qualitative data from citizen and end-user panels were collected across all cities over a series of workshops. These workshops captured a wide range of value indicators that were assigned to biophysical indicators by the project team. In this presentation we demonstrate a novel, hybrid Deep Learning method for processing gridded imaging data and existing map datasets into rich individual tree datasets that support different downstream valuation methodologies. We present a software pipeline built on Open Source tools to facilitate this, along with a set of example valuation use-cases. This project will inform urban planners, policymakers, and communities about the cultural and social benefits of urban treescapes and provide a blueprint for future city-scale valuation. By combining remote sensing with cultural and social valuation, this research contributes to the development of evidence-based strategies for sustainable urban planning, emphasising the importance of preserving and enhancing green spaces of the UK.