TreeTwin at the URBORETUM Annual Meeting

At the URBORETUM Annual Meeting at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), greehill presented the current status of TreeTwin, its contribution to a federally funded, five-year research project focused on urban forests. Represented by Vice President Europe Sven König, greehill shared results from large-scale LiDAR-based urban tree scans across four German cities, covering 55,367 urban trees and establishing a consistent, multi-city data baseline for research and future platform development.

The meeting was hosted by KIT, one of Europe’s leading research institutions and a central partner within URBORETUM. Through its Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS), KIT plays an important role in connecting scientific research with applied urban and environmental systems.

TreeTwin: greehill’ s Role within URBORETUM

URBORETUM is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and brings together research institutions, cities, and technology partners to advance the understanding of urban trees in streets, parks, and cemeteries. Within this framework, TreeTwin is the work package dedicated to creating a digital twin of the urban forest.

greehill contributes the technological foundation for TreeTwin: mobile LiDAR scanning, operated with electric vehicles, combined with AI-based analysis to capture high-resolution structural and spatial data of urban trees under real-world conditions. The objective is not isolated inventories, but a methodologically consistent representation that can be used across cities and disciplines.

Status Quo: Urban Tree Scans across Four Cities

Since the start of URBORETUM in 2024, TreeTwin scans have been carried out in multiple case study cities.

• 2024: Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Freiburg, Heidelberg

• 2025: Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Freiburg

  
  

In total, 55,367 urban trees have been captured:

• Karlsruhe: 22,447

• Mannheim: 15,352

• Freiburg: 14,042

• Heidelberg: 3,526

  
  

All scans followed the same technical setup and analytical standards, ensuring comparability across municipalities and survey years. This consistency enables cross-city analysis and longitudinal research over time.

From Data Baseline to Research Enablement

A key outcome presented at KIT was the completion of a shared data baseline for the participating cities. This baseline now serves as a reference layer for the different URBORETUM work packages and supports research on topics such as ecosystem services, resilience, and environmental performance.

Building on the established baseline, URBORETUM partners are currently working on extending the scope of the digital twin in several directions. These include biodiversity-related indicators, health and cultural ecosystem services as non-monetary indices, additional parameters related to carbon and water dynamics, soil microorganism diversity, and new modules addressing ecosystem services such as VOC emissions and pollen-related aspects. Further pilot approaches include expanding from individual tree twins to clump- and stand-level representations and creating three-dimensional models to support thermal comfort analyses in selected case study cities.

Several of these extensions rely on data contributions from URBORETUM partners and are currently under feasibility assessment for integration into the greehill platform. Others will be addressed in the next phase of the research project. What is already in place is the foundation: a complete, methodologically consistent dataset that supports ongoing and future research activities.

Bridging Research and Platform Development

Beyond its role within URBORETUM, the TreeTwin dataset also informs the continued development of the greehill digital twin platform. Insights generated through the research project feed into the evaluation and development of new algorithms, ensuring that scientific findings translate into practical, scalable tools.

Collaboration at KIT

The Annual Meeting at KIT provided a forum for reviewing progress, aligning methodologies, and defining next steps across the consortium. The close collaboration with KIT and ITAS supports a long-term perspective on how digital twins of urban forests can be developed, tested, and refined over time within a rigorous research environment while remaining grounded in operational feasibility.

Outlook

With the data baseline now established, the next phases of URBORETUM will focus on deeper analysis and expanded modelling. TreeTwin provides a stable point of reference for this work.

For greehill, the Annual Meeting underscored the importance of contributing not only technology, but also structure and continuity to research-driven initiatives. As URBORETUM progresses, TreeTwin will continue to support both scientific inquiry and the evolution of digital tools for urban forestry.