When a Century-Old Arboretum Enters the Climate Century: Geneva’s Botanical Garden Goes Digital

The Geneva Botanical Garden is the kind of place where time feels layered. A cedar planted before the First World War stands beside species exchanged during early scientific collaborations. Every path bends around a tree that carries a story older than the city’s tram lines. 

For more than 120 years, this garden has collected, studied, and protected 1,200 tree and shrub species across 28 hectares. It is one of Europe’s most diverse urban arboreta and one of its most important. 

But history alone won’t protect a landscape shaped by a different climate. That’s why last month, for the first time, the garden was captured in high-resolution LiDAR and analysed through greehill’s AI platform. Seven hundred trees, some of them over a century old, now have a precise digital baseline, not for nostalgia, but for the future.   

A Historic Landscape Becomes a Climate Laboratory  

The Geneva Botanical Garden was never meant to be a museum, it was built on the idea that cities should learn from the world’s forests. But today, the learning is shifting direction. 

A tree that once arrived in Geneva as an academic exchange is now a climate witness. Its growth rings record drought years. Its crown shape reveals how heat waves reshape vitality and its biomechanical posture shows how storms stress structures. 

Digitising this collection transforms it into something new: a long-term climate observatory hiding in plain sight. 

Why a Digital Baseline Matters Now    

With the first scan, the Botanical Garden now has: 

• exact structural profiles, 

• canopy volume and density, 

• stress indicators, 

• spatial competition between species, 

• and the ability to compare these patterns year after year. 

This baseline replaces guesswork with clarity. It shows which heritage trees hold their resilience and which are quietly slipping into vulnerability. 

For researchers, it creates a living dataset and for gardeners a holistic planning instrument. Aswell for the city, an evidence base for how climate change is already reshaping one of its most beloved landscapes.  

A City Thinking Beyond Its Garden Walls   

The Botanical Garden is Geneva’s first step, but the intent reaches further. The city is now exploring an expansion of smart tree inventories beyond the garden, into streets, squares, and public parks. It’s a recognition that urban forestry, often treated as green aesthetics, is in fact strategic infrastructure. 

To the north, La Chaux-de-Fonds is taking a similar step. Next spring, together with our French partner Arboristes-Conseils, greehill will scan 10,000 trees across one of Europe’s highest-altitude cities, a place where continental climate, hard winters, and exposed streets create a different kind of vulnerability. 

Two very different landscapes, but one shared reality: trees can no longer be managed by memory or tradition alone. 

Technology as an Ecology Tool  

There’s a misconception that digitalisation distances people from nature. In practice, it does the opposite. By turning a tree into measurable geometry, you’re not diminishing it, you’re finally seeing what the human eye can’t reliably track through years of storms, heat, and change. 

For Geneva, this means: 

• protecting century-old specimens before issues become losses, 

• adapting care to shifting stress patterns, 

• and preparing the arboretum for a climate it wasn’t originally planted for. 

Therefore, digitalisation isn’t the replacement of expert knowledge, but it is the moment expert knowledge becomes visible. 

A Garden Facing Forward  

What happens in the Geneva Botanical Garden matters far beyond its gates. Cities around the world look to botanical institutions for clues about resilience which species adapt, which struggle, which interactions help ecosystems survive extremes. 

With its first digital baseline, Geneva is no longer only preserving history. It’s building a dataset for the next century of urban forestry. A record that will outlast staff rotations, policy shifts, and even the climate patterns of today. Seven hundred trees are now mapped in full detail. The next thousand will follow.