Interview: Dr. Lorien Nesbitt, Angela Rout
2021 Award recipients Dr. Lorien Nesbitt, Assistant Professor in the Department of Forest Resources Management, and Angela Rout, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Forest Resources Management share more about charting new ground with their work on urban forests.
The 5G data-driven natural asset management and integration project is looking at the application of different technologies to better understand urban forests and the people who live with them.
“Urban forests, namely trees and associated vegetation in cities, are a complex ecosystem,” explains Lorien Nesbitt, project lead. “Humans interact with them and get benefits from them, but they are also managing them.” The project team is trying to understand how such complex systems work. More specifically, they are using data collected from ground-based sensors, drones, and mobile phones to understand human movement patterns and how people generally use green spaces.
“Once we collect all the data, we can start drawing linkages to learn how human movements at a larger scale can inform, for example, the design of a park” adds Angela Rout, a postdoctoral researcher working on the project. The team also collected data through surveys about the use of green spaces.
“We are charting new ground with this project,” Lorien responded when asked to talk about difficulties encountered. “While UBC usually encourages on-campus research, it is also responsible for protecting its students, which makes gathering data more challenging.”
Additionally, the team mentions that data analysis, not only data collection, also represented a challenge.
“There is still a lot to be learned on how we use different types of data at different scales, so now we have been working on bringing these datasets together to inform our understanding,” Angela explained.
The project will have important implications for how we manage urban forest systems, but also for our understanding of how humans use them and move around cities. This is especially important for urban forest managers, primarily municipalities, who usually have limited resources. “Using tools like drones or distributed sensors can help them collect more detailed data around aspects like tree health, which is increasingly important as we move into a future with more climate change,” added Lorien. “It can also inform urban planning around park equity, to make sure that everyone has access to nature.”
5G data-driven natural asset management and integration represents a campus as a living lab project engaged in prototyping, meaning that it tests existing technologies in new ways. This is not only an opportunity for traditional research but also for the team to experiment with useful tools for managing healthy urban forest systems.