London’s transport network doesn’t end at the road surface. Over the coming months, greehill will create detailed 3D digital twins of approximately 25,000 street trees along 580 kilometres of the Transport for London (TfL) road network, establishing the first comprehensive digital baseline for one of the city’s largest living assets.
It’s greehill’s first deployment of this scope in the UK, and it places London alongside more than 130 cities worldwide, including Sao Paulo, Rome, and Singapore, that already use greehill’s urban tree intelligence system to manage their urban forests.
The Project
Working with TfL, greehill will scan street trees across the authority’s road network using mobile LiDAR, capturing structural data for each tree: trunk condition, canopy shape, lean angle, crown asymmetry, and proximity to roads or overhead infrastructure. That data is processed into a digital twin, a precise, measurable model of every tree, built from more than 70 data points, that can be compared against future scans to track change over time.
This isn’t a one-off survey but the foundation of a continuously updatable system. Once the baseline is established, TfL can re-scan the network in future and directly measure what’s changed like growth, decline or new risk, rather than starting from scratch with each inspection cycle. That’s the core difference between a digital twin and a traditional tree inventory, and it’s what makes the data usable for planning years out, not just today.
The deployment follows a successful pilot completed in the London boroughs of Croydon and Sutton, which proved the approach could scale reliably across a complex, high-traffic metropolitan road network. This rollout extends that work across the full TfL network and lays groundwork that other London boroughs could draw on for their own tree management programs in the years ahead.
Why TfL Is Doing This
Street trees along TfL’s network aren’t just landscaping, they’re functioning infrastructure that affects public safety, road maintenance, and climate resilience on some of the busiest streets in the world. A falling limb near a bus route or a root system disrupting a footpath is an operational and safety issue, not just an aesthetic one. Managing that risk requires the same kind of accurate, current data that TfL already maintains for roads, signals, and bridges.
Before this project, that data largely didn’t exist at scale. Tree inventories across London’s transport network were fragmented, often outdated, and built from periodic manual inspections that couldn’t realistically cover every tree on a useful cycle. With a digital baseline in place, TfL can move toward managing trees the way it manages other infrastructure assets:
- Prioritizing inspections based on actual structural condition and risk, rather than a fixed rotation
- Planning maintenance budgets using consistent, comparable metrics across the entire network, rather than estimates
- Tracking change over time by comparing future scans against this baseline, catching decline early, before it becomes a hazard or a costlier repair
- Reporting climate impact like canopy cover, cooling effect, and carbon contribution in measurable terms rather than rough approximations
This is the same shift more than 130 cities globally have already made with greehill: from reactive tree management, where problems are addressed after they’re reported or after something fails, to a predictive system built on continuously updated data. You can see how that works in practice across greehill’s city deployments, from dense capitals to regional transport authorities.
What This Means for Urban Forestry in the UK
This is one of the largest digital tree mapping deployments undertaken by a transport authority anywhere in the UK, and it signals something broader than a single contract: trees are increasingly being treated as critical infrastructure, not a parks-department afterthought, by the agencies responsible for keeping cities moving. When a transport authority commissions a project at this scale, it’s a strong signal of where urban asset management is heading.
It’s also a model other London borough, and other UK cities, can look to directly. The pilot in Croydon and Sutton proved the technology works at borough scale; this deployment proves it works across an entire metropolitan transport network. The next logical step is for other authorities to build on that same baseline approach rather than starting from fragmented, manual inventories of their own.
Cities already know every metre of road they own. Increasingly, they’ll need the same level of understanding for the trees growing alongside it and London, through TfL, is now building exactly that.
Bringing Digital Tree Management to Your City
TfL’s project is part of a pattern playing out in cities on every populated continent: transport authorities, parks departments, and municipal governments replacing fragmented, manual tree inventories with continuously updated digital systems. If your city or organization is facing the same gap like outdated tree data, reactive risk management or no real way to track change over time, this is the moment to close it before the next storm season, budget cycle, or safety incident forces the issue.
Talk to our team about what a digital baseline could look like for your network, or explore how the greehill system works end to end, from LiDAR scan to actionable metrics. You can also see the full range of metrics greehill tracks per tree, and browse other cities already running on greehill to see what’s possible at scale.
greehill provides digital twin technology for urban forest management, operating in more than 130 cities worldwide. Book a demo to see how it could work for your city.
Photo credit: Shutterstock – ID: 2472105329
