NSW has committed AU$2.58 million to expanding urban canopy through the Greener Neighbourhoods Grant. This creates an opportunity for the 43 eligible councils, from Sydney to Wollongong to Newcastle, now scoping applications ahead of the 21 August deadline, with individual councils eligible to apply for grants of up to AU$60,000.
Securing funding is only the first step. The real challenge begins once implementation starts: demonstrating what the investment actually changed.
Applications will move quickly, planting locations will be identified and investment decisions will follow. The question that often gets overlooked is whether councils know enough about today’s canopy to measure what those investments change.
Every Infrastructure Investment Starts with a Baseline
Infrastructure funding almost always begins with a clear understanding of the asset. A road resurfacing grant assumes a pavement condition survey and a stormwater upgrade assumes pipe condition data and as-built drawings. But urban canopy funding is one of the few infrastructure categories where baseline data is not yet considered a prerequisite, largely because trees haven’t always been managed as infrastructure in the first place although urban trees are no different.
A street tree intercepts stormwater the drainage system wasn’t sized for, and it shades asphalt that would otherwise radiate heat back into the evening. Like other infrastructure, it degrades, gets damaged, occasionally becomes a liability, and eventually needs replacing, usually on a timeline that has little to do with the electoral or budget cycle governing the decisions made about it.
Seen this way, a tree inventory stops being a nice-to-have and starts working like an asset register for water mains or road pavement: a record a council needs not for its own sake, but because maintenance scheduling, risk assessment, and capital planning all depend on knowing, with some precision, what’s actually out there.
Most NSW councils already have a version of this. The problem is rarely the absence of a system. It’s the resolution of what’s inside it. And for councils moving through this winter’s planning season with a Greener Neighbourhoods application in progress, that resolution is about to matter more than usual: it’s the difference between reporting a planting number in eighteen months and reporting a measured outcome.
When Records Fall Behind
Perth provides a useful example. Between February and March 2025, several local government areas across the metropolitan region were managing an active outbreak of Polyphagous Shot Hole Borer, an invasive beetle spreading between susceptible host trees along connected corridors, a problem that could only be contained by knowing exactly which trees were vulnerable and where. The local government areas that commissioned detailed inventories using greehill’s Smart Tree Inventory, in some cases 8,000 to 20,000 trees each, fed that data straight into Forestree, the operational platform already used on the ground, because information a council can’t act on inside its existing workflow arrives too late to matter.
Beetles aside, the pattern holds for almost any urban forestry problem: a council finds out how current its records are precisely when it can least afford them to be wrong.
Managing Change over Time
Not every tree-management problem is urgent. At Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne, the Victoria Racing Club manages several thousand trees, some more than a century old: trees whose value has less to do with canopy targets and more to do with continuity, history, and the fact that nothing planted today replaces what’s already standing for another hundred years. Here, the relevant question isn’t how fast a threat is spreading, but how a structure changes almost imperceptibly across seasons and years, in ways easy to miss without a consistent basis for comparison.
LiDAR scanning gave the site something it didn’t have before: a precise, repeatable geometric record of canopy structure and branch architecture for every individual tree, fine enough that one scan can be meaningfully compared against the next. As the club’s arboriculture manager, David Da Silva, put it, the technology helps “detect risks earlier, plan maintenance more confidently, and ensure we’re caring for these historic trees with the detail and respect they deserve.” The statement is modest by design: not a transformation, just a firmer basis for decisions that were already being made carefully.
Better Data, Same Systems
At Sanctuary Cove in Queensland, roughly 8,500 trees now feed into ArborSafe, the risk management platform the site was already using. The platform itself did not change. What changed was the resolution of the data going into it: measured canopy dimensions and verified species in place of estimates, and precise locations in place of approximate ones. This is exactly the role of greehill’s Smart Tree Inventory.
Rather than replacing existing asset management systems, it creates a precise, repeatable digital inventory of the trees a council manages. The resulting data supports maintenance planning, risk management, planting programmes and long-term monitoring, while integrating with platforms councils already use, such as Forestree and ArborSafe. Aerial and satellite analysis helps councils understand canopy cover across a city. Smart Tree Inventory answers a different question: which individual trees are under council management, what condition they are in and how they change over time. Together, these datasets complement rather than replace one another.
A risk classification is only as trustworthy as the data behind it. Inspection schedules built on approximate positions could cover the wrong ground more often than ones built on exact ones. It’s that kind of improvement that changes how well a council’s decisions hold up when someone eventually asks to see the reasoning behind them.
Beyond Planting
Funding for planting is easy to justify and easy to report on, but what it can’t do on its own is answer the harder question of whether the canopy, taken as a whole, is expanding, holding steady despite losses elsewhere, or shifting in composition in ways nobody has tracked. That question sits underneath every planting programme, whether it gets asked or not. Councils that already hold an accurate, current picture of their canopy are in a different position than those working from an inventory nobody has updated in years.
Establishing a baseline of the city’s urban trees requires time and investment. That’s a real trade-off for councils working to fixed budgets and tight timelines. The good news is that winter planning provides one of the few opportunities to do this work before planting begins. Applications close 21 August, and nothing is going in the ground before then regardless of when the baseline work happens.
The programme sits within a broader target: 40 per cent tree canopy cover across Greater Sydney by 2036. Individual grants represent one part of achieving a goal at that scale, making it even more important that every dollar is directed where it will have the greatest long-term value. The councils that get the most value from this funding round are unlikely to be the ones that plant the most trees. They’ll be the ones that can demonstrate what changed because of the investment.
Planning Your NSW Application?
If your council is preparing a Greener Neighbourhoods application, now is the right time to establish a baseline of your urban forest. We’d be happy to discuss what that could look like for your local government area: what a LiDAR-based inventory would involve, how it would sit alongside the systems you already use, and what timeline would get a comparable dataset in hand before the next growing season.
greehill combines repeatable 3D capture by using street-level LiDAR and AI-supported processing to create consistent, objective data at city scale. It delivers timely, objective tree data through a cloud-based system built for municipal operations, integrating with the systems councils already use, from Forestree to ArborSafe. The result is not simply an inventory. It is the evidence councils need to measure progress, demonstrate outcomes and show the long-term value of public investment.
