Our cities stand today as a miraculous lab to foster an effective joint effort of different disciplines united by the common goal of setting our cities on a path towards well-being and social and environmental sustainability. As set out by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals [1], the UNFCCC Paris Agreement [2] and main current European policies [3,4], cities of the world need to take urgent action against climate change and to better manage future exponential urban population growth. That means to effectively reinvent our lifestyles and cities in the direction of sustainability. Towards an effective and holistic urban development, data infrastructures including earth and in-field observations, mobility, health and social media data are key means and need to be better integrated to ensure the advancement of sustainability, biodiversity and climate change science in urban and peri-urban areas.

In particular, growing attention is given today to the study of urban green. Why studying trees in our cities is so important? For many reasons, given by the several benefits that urban trees provide, including cooling air, filtering air pollutants, regulating water flow, mitigate CO2 emissions, improving citizens health and well-being, saving energy for air conditioning and heating, and increasing urban biodiversity by providing food and protection to many species [5]. Taking into account the current effort of data scientists in the analysis of variables such as urban mobility, energy and quality of life, the related interconnections with urban green data open many insights for the development of new integrated methods and data-based approaches to urban metabolism analysis. In order to optimize the research effort and related outputs in this broad study horizon, the comparability and scalability of results from innovative tools are among the biggest challenges for the future research on cities.

Starting from this premise, the Institute of Information Science and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council (ISTI-CNR), IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca and Eliante charity are currently collaborating to develop cutting-edge solutions for urban green assessment. Their results will support the scientific research on tools and methods for systematized urban green data collection and analysis, and may represent a precious starting point for new interesting scientific collaborations. In particular, researchers from the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences - Production, Landscape, Agroenergy of the University of Milan are currently supporting the Sustainable Cities for Citizens task to reason and cooperate on further evolution and development of urban green studies on the SBD platform. The first collaboration is taking place in the context of the “Automated methods of urban green analysis - State of the art” micro-project, aiming at providing a preliminary definition of the state-of-the-art upon automatic and non automatic methods for systematized urban green data collection. In this regard, preliminary results of the micro-project activities will be discussed on July 13, 2021 at 5 pm by Giorgio Vacchiano, Associate Professor in Forest Management and Silviculture at the University of Milan, in the dedicated webinar entitled "Automated methods of urban green analysis". «There is a need for research to rise to the challenge of monitoring and planning urban forests and their benefits in a changing climate» said Giorgio Vacchiano. «We have summarized the most recent technological advances to support the assessment of urban forests, from remote sensing to simulation models of tree growth. We also highlighted which cities or regions with available open data about their urban tree - an example to be imitated by all administrations around the globe, with the support of technology and citizen science». In line with the objectives and expectations of the project, hopefully new partners would get involved to nurture fruitful new research partnerships and collaborations for sustainable cities and urban green research in SBD. «We hope this is just the first of many collaborations to come. The increasing complexity of new societal and scientific challenges requires interdisciplinary research groups and a dialogue between different disciplines, backgrounds, and ways of thinking» said Luca Pappalardo, data scientist at KDD Lab of ISTI-CNR.

Written by Simona Re (researcher in Ecology at the Italian charity Eliante, Italy), Angelo Facchini (Assistant Professor in Complex Networks Research at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca), and Michela Natilli (Statistician at ISTI-CNR, KDD Lab).

References

[1] United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2015) The 17 Sustainable Development Goals; sdgs.un.org/goals

[2] United Nations, Climate Change (2015) The Paris Agreement; unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement

[3] European Commission (2019) A European Green Deal; ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en

[4] European Commission (2020), Biodiversity strategy for 2030; ec.europa.eu/environment/strategy/biodiversity-strategy-2030_it

[5] Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2016) Benefits of urban trees; www.fao.org/resources/infographics/infographics-details/en/c/411348/