Citizen Science Seminar: Assessing Urban Carbon Sequestration: Tree-Quest, a Citizen Science Mobile App to Measure Single Trees

Bildhinweis: CC-BY source: IIASA

It is well known that trees sequester carbon as they grow, providing a nature-based solution for absorbing atmospheric carbon. Many cities in Europe monitor their trees and have already inventoried them, but those databases are often out of date. Many cities lack tree inventories altogether. This all affects our ability to account for carbon stored in urban trees and vegetation, making these components among the most uncertain in the global carbon cycle.  Tree-Quest, our free citizen-science app, addresses this gap in open ground-through data on individual tree carbon stocks and enables a crowdsourced data stream that will improve the assessment of urban carbon stocks at spatial and temporal scales that traditional inventories cannot match. Beyond data collection, the app engages citizens in understanding the role of their local trees in the global carbon cycle. 

This talk will present the Tree-Quest app and the results of this year's pilot campaign, in which more than 35 Austrian school classes took part and collected over 30,000 measurements of local trees. We will present the current efforts to make this dataset openly available, which involve various manual and AI-driven quality-curation approaches. Finally, we will outline the potential to scale this initiative beyond Austria and integrate this crowdsourced dataset together with satellite imagery and machine learning to map urban carbon more accurately.   

About the speaker

Milutin Milenković is a research scholar in the Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group of the IIASA Advancing Systems Analysis Program. His current research focuses on combining Earth Observation and Citizen Science for monitoring environmental change, particularly forest growth and resilience. He is also a guest lecturer at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria.

Milenkovic holds a PhD (with distinction) in Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing from Vienna University of Technology, Austria, and an engineer's degree in Geodesy from the University of Belgrade, Serbia. He completed his postdoctoral research at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, working on big Earth Observation data for monitoring Amazon rainforest disturbance and recovery. His PhD research focused on mapping different physical characteristics of natural surfaces, such as surface roughness and vegetation transmittance, and 3D tree modeling using laser scanning and photogrammetry. 

(c) Milutin Milenkovic