Together with National Parks Board (NPB), we are honoured that our R&D project in "Transforming Urban Tree Management" has been selected as one of the top five projects under the category for AL C7.  ICT Application: Benefits in all aspects of life - E-Environment, as the WSIS Prize 2020 Champion. Our R&D project is anchor for award submission and outcome of this project is being used to develop NParks new tree inspection SOP. This project will have an positive impact on NParks operations and also aid in monitoring trees with limited manpower resources.

Digitalisation of Tree Management

The Digitalisation of Tree Management aims to meet the challenges of managing Singapore’s greenery, which includes declining labour workforce, rising public expectation, urbanisation and climate change. NParks transformed its urban tree management through digitalisation to maintain Singapore as a City in a Garden and sustain a quality living environment for its residents.

In a study by MIT Senseable City Lab in 2017, Singapore was cited as the greenest city in the world. This was possible based on a rigorous regime of tree management and a spirit of continual innovation in greening. Below are some recent digitalisation initiatives:

• A common geo-spatial platform & mobile field application was developed for arborists to access the geo-tagged urban trees and update the inspection & maintenance records. An online portal (trees.sg) was setup for the public to obtain trees information, tag photos, and email a tree, for public outreach & education. Other technologies adopted includes aerial drones to access hard-to-reach areas for tree inspection, statistical models to assess tree structural stability, and data analytics for tree risk assessment.

• NParks is further developing a system to automatically extract the physical tree parameters from LiDAR scans to create spatially, semantically & biologically accurate 3D tree models. From this, many potential applications can be developed, which will fundamentally change the way we manage our trees. E.g. by significantly cutting down time to measure & collect these data, allowing modelling of a single tree & at a city scale level to glean insights to our tree management plans, performing landscape design through 3D visualisation, performing carbon accounting and quantification of greenery.

This transformation will bring about more efficient, effective and sustainable ways of managing trees in a city and show the way forward as cities increasingly turn to greening as a response to climate change.

About UN WSIS Prizes 2020

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum is a global United Nations’ multi-stakeholder platform that is co-organised by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). It represents the world’s largest annual gathering of the ‘ICT for development’ community, which provides an opportunity for information exchange, knowledge creation and sharing of best practices, while identifying emerging trends and fostering partnerships taking into account the evolving information and knowledge societies. The WSIS Prizes is a unique internationalcontest to evaluate and recognize individuals, governments, civil society, local, regional and international agencies, research institutions and private sector companies for outstanding success in implementing development-oriented strategies that leverage the power of ICT as an enabler of development. The WSIS Prizes were started in 2012.