forest management. This has involved installing ground-based
sensors on trees, working with anonymized mobile phone data
to see how people might be moving through the urban land-
scape, and flying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones)
to test different sensors and flight parameters for gathering
high-resolution data on urban trees and green spaces. I became
a certified drone pilot to lead the latter part of the work.
What do you see as your doctoral research's
applicability to the work of urban foresters?
SN: Our research team has been piloting a few technolo-
gies at UBC, which can be deployed at different scales, from a
single tree to an entire neighbourhood. What's exciting about
treating campus as a "living lab" where we can test these new
tools is that not only are we collecting data on the urban forest
ecosystem, but we are also figuring out how these technol-
ogies could actually be feasibly used in the "real world."
We ask questions such as: How can we improve battery life on
these sensors? Is the sensor system scalable to other sites and
cities? Which drones are affordable and easy to use, and how is
the data gathered useful to managers and practitioners? Are there
privacy or regulatory concerns when implementing these technol-
ogies, and how might these potentially impact their use? As we
started deploying these technologies, we also interviewed urban
forestry and green infrastructure practitioners to get a sense of
key needs, general challenges, and technology uptake opportu-
nities, which has informed some of our work on applicability.
What misconceptions do you see folks having
about technology's role in urban forestry?
SN: I think some people are concerned that if we decide to inte-
grate technology more ubiquitously in urban forest management,
we will suddenly install a bunch of sensors everywhere and do
absolutely everything from our tablets and smartphones—and
maybe lose some important knowledge as a result, as well as
our innate connection with the natural systems we work with.
It's not necessarily a bad thing to be worried about how much we
use technology and how much data we create and consume (I defi-
nitely use my phone way too much), but it does reinforce the idea
that it's important to be thoughtful and cautious about the value
we create when we look to apply technology in novel ways in urban
forestry. Let's not use technology for technology's sake, but instead
be very clear about key problems we're looking to solve, and think
through how technology then plays a role in addressing them. >>
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