FCF Urban Tree Canopy

Key Themes

The Forth Climate Forest is based around 4 key themes. The Communities and Canopy themes focus on increasing the number of trees in and around settlements, with the aim to increase the urban tree canopy to 20% in all our villages, towns and city.

 _{The impacts of climate change upon urban areas, such as increased exposure to heat stress and elevated levels of air pollution, are in part caused by the removal of vegetation relative to rural environments. Academic research recommends a minimum canopy cover target of 20% for UK settlements to help alleviate these impacts.} 

Overview

The Forth Climate Forest commissioned an analysis of the existing tree canopy cover. The aim of this was to assess current levels of cover and establish a baseline as we work towards achieving 20%.

 ^{The map is displaying the settlements within the Clackmannanshire, Falkirk and Stirling Council areas. The polygons are taken from 'National Records of Scotland - settlement boundaries (2020)'. These are  ‘….. geographical boundaries for settlements within Scotland. A settlement is defined to be a group of high density postcodes whose combined population rounds to 500 people or more. They are separated by low density postcodes.’} 

The assessment

The University of Stirling trained an AI (artificial intelligence) model to identify and quantify trees in urban areas and green spaces.

The model was initially trained using data for the City of Stirling. It was then used to carry out the assessment of all the settlements within the Forth Climate Forest project area.

The Results

The analysis identified over 500,000 trees within and around our settlements. The tree canopy cover within settlements varied from 5% to 21%.

 ^{The map shows the results for Kippen where 890 trees were identified providing 14.5% canopy cover.}  

Priorities

The analysis has enabled Forth Climate Forest to identify priority neighbourhoods - areas that have a low level of tree canopy and suffer from high levels of environmental deprivation. These areas are likely to suffer the most significant impacts from changes to our climate and so are the initial focus for our urban tree planting activities.

 ^{The map shows a priority datazone within Stirling that has only 2% urban tree canopy cover, the lowest in the Forth Climate Forest project area.} 

Next Steps

We are currently developing a web portal that will allow users to access the urban tree data and provide information on individual trees.​

Next Steps

The web platform will allow users to access information on the current number of trees and tree canopy cover within a settlement.