Nature data for urban areas: OPO

Why Melbourne?

“Melbourne stands out for urban greening through local government initiatives and built environment design industry. City of Melbourne nature-related policies, including the 2010 Urban Forest policy and Green Factor Tool, set a standard that other cities around the world look to for inspiration. Local designers, such as landscape architects, also help integrate public infrastructure and natural systems to combat rising temperatures, increase biodiversity and improve community access to green space. This all encourages innovation that supports nature based empirical evidence to underpin government policies and capital works decisions. Building a technology environment on such a strong nature-focused foundation is an exciting next-step for Melbourne.” 

– Office of Planetary Observations Founder, Thomas Gooch 

Challenge

The world is on track to hit 1.5 degrees warming. The impact of this increase will be felt most in cities and regional centres with a predominance of hard surfaces and limited shade-creating greenery. 

As our urban environments get hotter, getting access to customised ‘nature data’ that quantifies where and why trees need to be planted is vital for urban planners, including those in city councils, if they are to encourage policy makers to take steps to effectively to mitigate heat risks.  

Unfortunately, conventional approaches to gathering ‘nature data’ puts this evidence base illusively out of reach. Conventional methods take too long and are prohibitively expensive for many councils, even though it is often less affluent councils that need green infrastructure the most.  

Also, conventional data gathering doesn’t necessarily yield comprehensive or diverse enough results to enable the detailed analytics required to develop a compelling case for green infrastructure. Without data and analytics to highlight the need, planners are less likely to be able to persuade policy makers to prioritise green infrastructure. And all the while, the temperature keeps rising. 

Solution

Office of Planetary Observations (OPO) is a Melbourne start-up that has developed an in-house ‘nature data’ platform powered by AI to provide easy and affordable access to real-time data, insights and reporting. 

The platform is set up as a simple online dashboard so anyone with a professional need can access it without requiring specific skills, experience or a big budget. This makes it useful for everyone working with green infrastructure – from landscape architects, civil engineers and council planners to tree surgeons and property developers.  

Here’s how it works: Choose the location you want to focus on, input your greening targets and set the actions (such as tree planting, tree health, tree loss). You can also customise data inputs by setting your policy target, a due date and other priorities. 

A customised dashboard then shows whether you are hitting your targets according to temperature (heat stress) measurements, and percentage of canopy coverage and green infrastructure. 

OPO’s software crunches the numbers and outputs an array of insights and actions relating to tree canopy percentage, tree health, loss or gain, tracking over time and where to plant to best reduce heat. It also benchmarks current conditions against historical performance and compares them to related urban environments. 

The platform then synthesises the data, insights, actions into a report that, paired with supporting digital tools, creates an evidence-base for policy makers and stakeholders that highlights the impact their decisions can have on nature and their community.  

Result

The versatility of OPO’s nature data platform is quickly being realised. Large organisations like Telstra and BUPA, and city councils from Melbourne to Darwin have used it to deliver health metrics and inform capital works decisions on green infrastructure. 

For example, the City of Greater Shepparton in northern Victoria used OPO’s data to inform its Urban Forest Strategy, with the goal of increasing urban forest canopy cover by 40% by 2037.  

  “Thermal imaging demonstrates the correlation between tree canopy cover and relative radiant temperatures. Our partners, Active Green Services and OPO, have been fantastic to help highlight this using AI technology, making it easily accessible at low cost. This means we can use the data to accurately plant trees where heat island areas were identified in the report and where trees are being removed. We can then educate the community on the importance of retaining trees in an urban setting.” 

– Shepparton Council Arboriculture Coordinator, Eric Heeps 

Access to affordable, real-time data also opens the door for councils like Shepparton to share knowledge with its government neighbours and like-minded organisations, research institutes and community groups.  

If we think big enough, sharing nature data can have an impressive ripple effect by helping break down industry silos, influencing high level policy and accelerating up-take of green infrastructure across national industries from property and construction to telecommunications and health. 

This is the idea behind the Federal Government’s recently introduced Nature Repair Market. Enshrined in an Act of Parliament on 15 December 2023, the Market is designed to make nature-related investment easier and drive nature repair across Australia.  

Benefits of Green Infrastructure

Green infrastructure – maintaining and increasing vegetation – helps to cool urban areas through shading and evapotranspiration. It can provide adaptation measures to climate shocks by absorbing heavier rain events, heat waves and limiting the effects of high winds from severe storms. Green infrastructure also cleans the air and provides community health benefits through exposure to nature. Increasing green corridors in urban areas also supports the natural protection and food sources for our fauna, such as birds, tree dwelling animals and insects which are all environmental keystone animals in the food chain.