Midland is the first and only city in the state of Michigan to incorporate artificial intelligence to help maintain its urban forest.
According to a press release, the city’s forestry division partnered with the Davey Resource Group to deploy vehicles equipped with LiDAR cameras around Midland and its parks. The initiative was funded by a grant from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources Forest Resources Division.
The LiDAR system captured and recorded the species, age, size and health of each scanned tree.
Marcie Post, Midland’s director of parks and recreation, said the data will be used to create a tree inventory for the city’s five foresters to use in maintaining over 40,000 trees across city's out lawns and parks.
“This technology that we're using gives us an opportunity to go through and really understand what we have,” Post told WCMU.
Post said the inventory will allow the foresters to better assess the needs of Midland's urban forest. From there, the forestry division can work with the parks and recreation commission to appeal to the city for additional resources.
“To have that data, to go back to the decision makers to say, we know that trees are good, we know that if we can add X number of trees, it will help our city do this,” she said. “It really monetizes that and helps us make a case for more trees in our community.”
Asia Dowtin, an associate professor of urban forestry at Michigan State University, said the data Midland collects using AI will allow city foresters to monitor biodiversity, canopy cover and overall tree health in order to promote a more resilient urban forest.
"It's like a gold mine," Dowtin said. "It gives them the best, most accurate, up-to-date understanding of what trees are in their community. It sets the foundation for every decision that they make moving forward."
Dowtin said collecting data using LiDAR technology helps to identify potential issues faster than foresters would be able to the old-fashioned way, and costs about the same as a traditional full-scale inventory.
But, she said, the technology cannot replace the teams of specialists needed to interpret the data it collects.
“Anytime it [the AI] makes a scan, it can run through those different filters to run an analysis that allows you to know what it was looking at and to have confidence in what it tells you,” she said. “On the flip side, AI is nothing without humans training that system. And so, there's still the need for trained urban foresters, trained plant health specialists, to look at the data that's coming in to train the system and tell it, yes, that's a tree.”
Trees play a critical role in urban areas, Dowtin said. Healthy urban forests can mitigate environmental concerns, improve people's mental health and make cities more enticing for outsiders.
“There's a lot of research that shows that if you have a community that has like a central business district, it is much more likely that people will spend more time in that central business district if there are trees present than if there is not,” she said. “And to that point, people are more likely to spend money in those central business districts if the trees are there, and they're able to lollygag.”
Midland has held a Tree City USA designation for the past three decades. Post said the title is a testament to how much the city values its trees, and she hopes the city will continue to invest in its urban forest.
“Going forward, we've got a really great plan in place with our capital improvement plan to make sure that we have the budget and we have the dollars and the funds available to be proactive,” Post said. “They're [the trees] just so important to us. And I feel pretty lucky to be in a community that has residents that do value the benefit of a tree.”
