Vision:
By 2020, healthy, robust, and resilient urban ecosystems will have displaced crumbling and obsolete grey infrastructures in our cities. City managers will have come to rely on deep collaborations with residents to manage and maintain these new living systems. The TreeKIT suite of tools will have become a standard for facilitating open participation in maintaining living, green infrastructures, and in turn, these systems will make cities more and more sustainable places to live.

Approach:
In the short-term, TreeKIT is focused on developing tools for collaboratively managing urban forests – one of many types of “green infrastructure” found in cities. Working in teams, TreeKIT volunteers use simple site-surveying skills to find the accurate location of curbside trees. Along the way, they build a detailed inventory of useful information about the urban environment. TreeKIT draws on these inventories to create interactive tools that help volunteer tree stewards collaborate with each other and with tree care professionals in government agencies and local organizations.