It's like walking around a place like São Paulo and realizing: some neighborhoods are oases, others are deserts. The vegetation coverage varies greatly throughout the city. And this is a global problem. Today, Google released a new tool to assess the vegetation coverage of any city. The Tree Canopy Lab uses images and artificial intelligence to indicate where trees are most needed.
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The company’s goal is to encourage public administrations to plant more trees efficiently in order to reduce heat islands in large cities and increase vegetation cover. The initiative is part of the company’s environmental insights platform, Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE), to combat climate change.
The EIE is available “free of charge to help cities measure emission sources, perform analyses, and identify strategies to reduce emissions.” emissions“, according to the Google.
How does it work?
Google's tree cover analysis tool locates and measures the density of tree canopies and, using color and infrared aerial images collected by planes throughout the seasons, creates a map comparing the images from different angles.
Tree Canopy Lab's artificial intelligence produces a map to indicate where more trees are needed. Los Angeles, in the United States, was the test city for the tool. Google's idea is to expand Tree Canopy Lab to hundreds of cities in 2021 and thus connect cities to the environment, expanding plant coverage, improving air quality and the thermal sensation in several countries.
Just like Google Maps, anyone will be able to access the new tool and assess the vegetation cover of the city in which they live.
Through which channels you reach those people, classic and out of the box. Google
Image: Daria Obymaha/Pexels/CC
