With more cities looking towards introducing greenery to reduce urban heat, strengthen biodiversity, and improve quality of life, they need reliable systems, accurate information and efficient workflows to manage this living infrastructure throughout its lifecycle.
Trees take years to mature and decades to deliver their full value to a city, which means the systems used to monitor and care for them must be built with the same long-term horizon in mind.
This is the context behind a new five-year partnership between greehill and Singapore’s National Parks Board (NParks), extending a collaboration that began five years ago. The renewed agreement reflects the continued importance of developing and tapping on technology to monitor, manage and maintain urban trees.
The Real Challenge Behind the Numbers
Urban forestry is moving beyond inventories. For many years, tree management focused on maintaining a static record of what exists and where. Today, cities increasingly require operational systems that connect inspections, maintenance planning, risk assessment and long-term investment decisions into a continuous workflow.
Trees have their own condition, structure, maintenance history and changing risk profile. Through its City in Nature vision, Singapore has become one of the world’s leading examples of managing urban trees as critical infrastructure, applying the same discipline to data, planning and long-term stewardship as it does to other essential public assets.
“This agreement reflects the strength of the partnership we have built with NParks,” said Gabor Goertz, CEO of greehill. “Singapore is one of the most advanced examples of urban forest management at scale. We are pleased to support NParks with technology that enables more consistent data, clearer priorities and more efficient day-to-day operations. Ultimately, an inventory tells a city what it has. An operational system tells a city what to do next.”
Long-term collaboration enables technology, operational processes and institutional knowledge to evolve together rather than through disconnected project cycles. This continuity is one of the key advantages of partnerships that extend beyond individual implementation projects.
Building Operational Capability
The collaboration includes a long-term licence for the greehill Engine and the development of an enhanced Remote Tree Management System 2.0 (RTMS 2.0). RTMS 2.0 brings together a more integrated platform for tree data and operational insights, providing one scalable digital environment for the management of urban trees.
Continuity of information just as important as the information itself. A tree’s condition today is not a fixed data point but part of an ongoing story, and the value of any system built to manage that story compounds the longer it is maintained without interruption.
The partnership provides the foundation for the continued development of NParks’ tree management system, allowing technology, workflows and data to evolve together as Singapore’s urban forest continues to grow.
What This Means Beyond Singapore
Any city investing seriously in its tree canopy will eventually face the same question Singapore has addressed: how do you manage millions of individuals, living assets with the same rigour, consistency and long-term thinking applied to other forms of critical infrastructure? As climate adaptation becomes a defining priority for cities worldwide, the ability to manage urban forests as living infrastructure is likely to become a core capability rather than a specialist function.
Technology enables resilient urban forests. Long-term partnerships sustain them.
Urban forests will need systems which enable continuity, trusted data and operational knowledge, allowing cities to manage living infrastructure with confidence over decades rather than project cycles. Ultimately, that is what this partnership represents.
The cities that will lead tomorrow are unlikely to be those with the most data. They will be the ones that turn data into better decisions, year after year.
Photo credit: Shutterstock – ID: 2630009191
