Looking Back at 2025

2025 was a year of major growth for greehill. In 2025, Smart Tree Management became a repeatable system for more cities, not just a one-time project.

More cities trusted us with their streets and parks. More urban trees came into clear, verifiable view. And more decisions were made based on structured information rather than habit or assumption.

That progress did not happen by itself. It was earned through real work, carried across real cities, under real operational conditions.

This year took us to nearly all continents, across the Americas, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and Europe. The range of conditions we operated in expanded significantly: different climates, street layouts, species structures, municipal requirements, and delivery realities.

Some projects were first-time city-wide baselines. Others were repeat scans in cities that are now building year-to-year visibility into their urban forest. In both cases, the direction was consistent: cities are moving away from one-time documentation toward repeatable, operational tree management.

Why a Smart Tree Inventory is never just data 

A Smart Tree Inventory is often described as a dataset. In practice, it is the result of a full delivery process.

Work begins long before scanning starts: defining routes, coordinating access, handling local constraints, and ensuring that operations fit the rhythm of a living city. It continues through processing and validation: checking outputs, maintaining consistency, refining workflows, and improving the system so each project builds on the last. The final and most critical step is translation.

City teams do not manage trees in abstract models. They manage them through established workflows, categories, and planning cycles. For many cities, seeing their entire urban forest represented in a consistent, searchable, city-wide structure is new. Turning that visibility into day-to-day use requires clarity, alignment, and trust.

From inventory to management continuity

A tree inventory can mean different things to different cities. Sometimes it is a regulatory requirement. Sometimes it is a long-overdue baseline. Often, it reflects the practical difficulty of keeping information current across an entire street network. What changes the dynamic is continuity.

When a city can return to its tree baseline, measure change, and update information over time, the inventory stops being documentation and becomes operational infrastructure intelligence.

This is the purpose of the Smart Tree Management Cycle: plan, prioritise, act, and monitor. Not as a slogan, but as a structure that reflects how urban tree management actually works. With a reliable baseline in place, planning becomes clearer, prioritisation becomes defensible, actions become more targeted, and monitoring becomes repeatable.

Why the full system matters

Cities do not need isolated tools that produce outputs without context. They need systems that function reliably across the full delivery chain: street-level LiDAR scanning, analysis, a verified tree baseline, and outputs that align with how teams plan and operate.

This matters because urban tree management happens under constraint, limited resources, established processes, and increasing pressure from climate conditions. It also matters because the same system must perform consistently across very different environments: dense historic centres and wide road networks, humid regions and dry ones, different species compositions and maintenance practices.

When the system holds under these conditions, cities can work faster and with greater confidence. When it does not, trust erodes and continuity breaks down.

What changed in 2025

Looking back, the most notable shift this year was not only scale, but expectation. As greehill expanded rapidly into new regions, cities increasingly approached us with more specific and more demanding questions. They were less interested in what the data looks like and more focused on how it can support prioritisation, budgeting, and long-term planning.

That change reflects growing maturity in how urban tree management is approached and a higher standard for what a city-wide system needs to deliver.

Looking ahead to 2026

The coming year will be less about reinvention and more about refinement: strengthening the core system, improving delivery consistency, and deepening work with cities that are building long-term management capability.

Pressure on urban forests will continue to increase, and cities will need reliable, actionable information to respond effectively. That means repeatable systems, consistent delivery, and clarity about how tree intelligence supports real decisions.

To our team, city clients, and everyone involved in delivery throughout the year: thank you for your trust and collaboration.

Happy Holidays and here’s to a New Year where more cities can manage their urban forests with clarity, because the reality is finally visible.