Trees + Tech Summit

Rachel Ormseth, Arbor Day Foundation

As communities pursue climate resilience and sustainability goals, successful tree distribution programs increasingly rely on strong partnerships, technology adoption, and effective change management. This session will explore how cities, utilities, nonprofits, and corporate partners are utilizing technology-enabled tree distribution programs that place the right trees in the right locations for maximum impact. Drawing from real-world examples, attendees will learn how organizations have navigated tree procurement and distribution through both in-person pickup events and direct-ship campaigns. The presentation will highlight how digital tools and nursery partnerships streamline program administration, improve participant experiences, and deliver measurable benefits such as energy savings, urban cooling, stormwater reduction, carbon sequestration, and increased tree canopy. Participants will gain practical insights into building successful cross-sector partnerships, overcoming adoption barriers, securing stakeholder buy-in, and scaling programs for longterm success. Attendees will leave with actionable strategies and a deeper understanding of how turnkey tree distribution programs can advance environmental goals while delivering meaningful community impact.

Bram Gunther & Zoe Evans, Plan it Wild & Wildr

Municipalities and environmental organizations need better ways to engage residents in climate and biodiversity action on private land. Wildr Places, a rewilding app, offers a private landowner-facing platform that can drive community campaigns to help achieve private, local, and state environmental goals. Wildr Places spreads and amplifies objectives and guides users to assess their land’s health and its potential for restoration so they can take meaningful ecological action. Our talk will explore how that model can support and advance community programs, local and state mandates, and new forms of measurable engagement.

Plan it Wild’s experience in suburbia is that local cities and towns are searching for ways to urge residents to adopt reforestation/rewilding models and targets to achieve municipal and state goals like increasing tree canopy, reducing carbon, and meeting biodiversity targets. Several cities have asked us to develop public Pocket Forests as models for what can be done on private property. In our recent grant proposal to DEC’s Advancing Forest Markets grant, we proposed using Wildr Places as a means to run a statewide reforestation campaign to increase interest in and demand for native trees on private property. We also proposed using Wildr Places to set up a native tree “marketplace” to match regional demand and supply and for users to purchase customized pocket forests.

All cities face the private property “paradox”: how to restore these land types, which are controlled by millions of individual landowners. Wildr Places is a means to communicate at scale with this demographic, connect people through their shared values and goals, and organize them to take action.

Hannah Gregory, PlanIT Geo

PlanIT Geo has long supported municipalities and counties throughout Washington State with Tree Inventories, Tree Canopy Assessments, and Urban Forest Management Plans, backed by our software products TreePlotter CANOPY and TreePlotter INVENTORY. Our work with clients throughout the state, from small towns to entire counties, has helped advance tree canopy initiatives that reinforce Washington’s communities as a model for urban forestry programs elsewhere.

This session highlights recent projects in Western Washington, including a tree inventory in Vancouver and an Urban Forest Management Plan in Bothell, before turning to an in-depth look at an ongoing Canopy Assessment on the urban-rural fringe of Clark County. PlanIT Geo will present a transferable GIS-based workflow for analyzing forest fragmentation that identifies forest cores, edges, and patches, revealing details that most canopy assessments overlook. This data has supported a salmon habitat quality analysis and informed the state’s newly implemented stormwater permit requirements. Attendees will learn how this approach aids local decisions regarding forest connectivity, conservation efforts, and urban-rural planning priorities.

Marie Ambusk, TreesROI

Tree root quality has long been recognized as one of the most important, yet least measurable, factors influencing the long-term success of urban trees. Throughout the nursery supply chain, critical decisions still rely largely on visual inspection and experience because the most important part of the tree remains hidden within the root ball.

This session tells the story of an emerging effort to change that.

Using INSIGHT®, a non-destructive 3D Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) Tree-CT inspection system developed through the National Science Foundation (NSF) SBIR program, I will demonstrate how advances in geophysics, engineering, tree biology, and data science are converging to make root quality visible, measurable, and actionable before planting.

Rather than focusing solely on the technology, the presentation explores how objective root quality assessment could transform nursery production, tree inspection, procurement, and urban forestry workflows. Attendees will see some of the first three-dimensional reconstructions of containerized tree root systems generated from GPR data and explore what these capabilities could mean for growers, municipalities, landscape architects, arborists, buyers, and the lifespan of the trees we grow where we live.

Most importantly, this is a conversation about leadership and collaboration. Solving the industry’s root quality challenge will require researchers, technology developers, growers, practitioners, and standards organizations working together toward a common goal.

The session will conclude with an interactive discussion about a simple question:
If we can objectively understand what has always been hidden, how should that change the way we inspect, buy, plant, value, and grow trees?
As we often say: It’s hard to fix what you can’t see.

Matt Carpenter, Gaia AI

Semi-automated forest inventory is no longer a dream. It is operational reality today, in the hands of federal agencies and institutional forest managers who need to know what is standing across millions of acres.

Gaia AI, an MIT spinout, is scaling that technology in production forestry: a SLAM-enabled LiDAR backpack that captures every stem as a forester walks, paired with satellite modeling that carries those measurements wall-to-wall. It is in use across 26 states.
That same technology is coming to cities. Urban trees deliver enormous value to the people living around them, and they deserve measurement as rigorous as what we give the trees we harvest. This talk is about what changes when a city can access the same tech institutional forest managers use.

And a look ahead: the capability the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of War are scaling for wildfire fuels data may be exactly what cities need to defend the wildland-urban interface.

Professor Daniel G. Aliaga, Purdue University

This presentation gives an update on the Purdue NSF-funded $5M UTREE project, a national-scale, web-based platform that combines satellite imagery, generative AI, and cloud computing to support interactive urban tree inventory, planning, scenario analysis, and ecosystem assessment.

UTREE is designed to: (1) provide nationwide urban tree data for U.S. cities (currently spanning ~20 cities across diverse ecoregions); (2) evaluate the temperature and human comfort impacts of neighborhood- and city-scale tree planting scenarios; (3) estimate current tree inventories, including tree locations and crown extents; (4) identify tree species using locally trained AI models; (5) quantify ecosystem services (e.g., through i-Tree); and (6) analyze links between urban trees, socioeconomic factors, and human health outcomes.

This session will also highlight upcoming capabilities, including on-demand tree inventory generation from current or historical imagery and support for uploading, downloading, and sharing tree inventories and analysis results.

Athena Beshur, City of Albuquerque

Participants will enjoy learning about how Albuquerque is navigating the prioritization of medians for planting using the federal tree grant funding by first identifying medians in the CEJST polygons <planting priority areas> of Albuquerque. These were further narrowed using ArcGIS to prioritize based on tree canopy, demographics and heat. We also incorporated size of medians and irrigation data from our Solid Waste- Clean Cities Department. We are now about to embark on another layer of complexity using PlanItGeo’s Tree Plotter software. In this step, existing trees are inventoried and planting sites marked. With each layer, we are gaining insite, not only on the medians themselves, but also the areas of town that are in need of additional canopy. Along some streets, due to existing infrastructure, the medians are the only opportune locations for shade. These not only provide sites for tree planting, but they may provide needed locations for green stormwater infrastructure, to slow, clean, and use stormwater when available to grow trees, protect grey infrastructure, and safeguard streets from flooding.

Shane McQuillan, Runway Group

This session profiles a community tree planting program and the partner organizations that support it, outlining its core goals and objectives. It highlights how TreePlotter software currently anchors day-to-day inventory and planting management, then looks ahead to emerging technologies under evaluation for the program’s next phase: robotic/automated watering, LiDAR-based tree inventories, drone-based canopy surveys, and automated tree delivery through the Arbor Day Foundation program. Attendees will come away with a practical look at how this program is layering new tools onto an existing software foundation to plant smarter, track more accurately, and scale community forestry.

Tifany Albrecht, PlanIT Geo

Urban forestry teams have more data and technology available to them than ever, but that doesn’t always make the work easier. In this session, Tifany Albrecht will share what PlanIT Geo is learning from the people using tree management software every day, the problems we believe technology needs to solve better, and how those insights are shaping what we build next. Using the TreePlotter roadmap as a real-world example, we’ll look at mobile field workflows, AI, LiDAR, connected data, planning, and reporting, along with the bets we’re making about where each can create meaningful value. We’ll also share the questions and assumptions we’re still exploring as we shape what comes next.

Ondrej Kolarik, Adbian

LiDAR is no longer a technology reserved for research institutions or large engineering firms. With the rapid decline in sensor costs and the widespread availability of handheld and smartphone-based scanners, its adoption in urban forestry is becoming a matter of when, not if. Yet arboriculture remains a traditionally conservative industry, where many professionals are still uncertain about how to integrate these new tools into their daily work.

This presentation provides a practical roadmap for consultants, municipalities, and tree inventory professionals who want to begin using LiDAR without significant upfront investment. Drawing from real-world projects, it will compare the capabilities of smartphone LiDAR, handheld scanners, and professional systems, outlining where each fits in day-to-day operations.

Beyond simply collecting point clouds, the presentation will demonstrate how LiDAR data can streamline tree inventories, improve documentation, and create long-term value by enabling future applications such as automated measurements, structural assessments, digital twins, and AI-assisted decision-making.

Rather than focusing on technology for its own sake, this session emphasizes practical implementation: what works today, what to avoid, and how to build workflows that will remain valuable as the technology continues to evolve.

Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how to start adopting LiDAR today, what level of hardware makes sense for their needs, and why building a library of high-quality 3D tree data will become one of the most valuable assets for arboricultural organizations in the years ahead.

Leslie Moorman, City of Cary, NC

Municipal tree inventories are essential for understanding, managing, and investing in the urban forest. Tree inventories traditionally focus on street trees, trees in rights-of-way, and landscaped areas of parks, places where individual trees can be readily accessed and evaluated. Much of the urban forest, however, exists beyond these managed landscapes. Natural wooded areas on public lands can represent a significant portion of a community’s tree canopy, yet these forests are often poorly inventoried and therefore difficult to manage proactively. Additionally, collecting and maintaining this data can be labor-intensive, time-consuming, and financially difficult, especially in parks and natural wooded areas. What if the forest could be inventoried from beneath the canopy by an autonomous drone?

The Town of Cary, North Carolina, is piloting what is believed to be the first project of its kind to combine an autonomous LiDAR-equipped drone with AI-powered tree identification and measurement for urban forest inventory. The goal is to explore emerging technology to make tree inventories more efficient, repeatable, and accurate—while opening the door to collecting information that has traditionally required significant field labor. The project will extend tree inventory beyond individual street and landscape trees to include the natural wooded areas within Town-owned parklands, creating data that can support management of these forests for long-term ecosystem health, resilience, and function.

The project begins with a backpack-carried LiDAR drone to collect high-quality spatial data that can be used to train and refine the AI system. As the technology develops, the drone will transition to autonomous flight beneath the tree canopy in parks and natural wooded areas. The system is being developed to measure DBH, tree height, and stem taper, with the potential to train the AI to identify tree species and recognize basic structural conditions such as broken or hanging limbs and cavities.

We will discuss the initial data-collection and training process, the challenges of developing reliable AI models for complex forest environments, and the potential applications of the resulting data.This presentation will explore the technology behind the pilot, why Cary is pursuing an unconventional approach to tree inventory, how the initial data-collection and AI-training process works, and what the Town is learning along the way. We will also discuss the limitations and challenges—including the time and field data required to train an AI system to reliably “see” trees.

The technology is still evolving, and the project will require time, field data, and iterative training, but the potential is significant. By making it more practical to inventory trees across both developed landscapes and natural forests, autonomous technology could help municipalities build more complete inventories, improve the efficiency and consistency of data collection, and ultimately make better-informed decisions about managing the urban forest as an ecological system—not simply a collection of individual trees.

The goal is not to replace arborists or foresters with robots. It is to explore whether autonomous technology can become another tool in the profession’s toolbox—helping us better understand, manage, and protect the forests we already own.

Ian Hanou, PlanIT Geo

Point clouds? Digital twins? Gaussian splats? Are we still talking about trees? Yes!

LiDAR remote sensing technology, which captures incredible three-dimensional detail of the physical world, is becoming more accessible and cost-effective. Coupled with AI, this creates digital twins or replicas of objects and GIS-based inventories of trees, forests, and much more. But we want to address the real question for urban forestry and arboriculture: when is it faster, better, cheaper and actually worth using?

In this session, Ian Hanou will look “beyond the point cloud” to explore where aerial, vehicle-mounted, drone-based, and handheld LiDAR can add meaningful value to tree inventories, tree protection, optimized maintenance, and broader management. He’ll cover what these sensors and deep learning models can reliably measure, where limitations still matter, how LiDAR can complement field expertise, and how imagery and AI are expanding what is possible. The session will focus on the practical tradeoffs that help determine when richer “TreeD” data is worth the investment and when a simpler approach may be enough. We’ll help you answer the question, “To Digital Twin or Not to Digital Twin?”