By combining artificial intelligence and Google Street View imagery, “digital twins” of hundreds of thousands of trees across North America were created. The simulations could help city planners better predict how seasonal foliage will promote cooling or when growing branches will need pruning.
“If you can model an existing set of trees, and you have a reasonable model of infrastructure like power lines, you can understand where the trees that grow onto power lines are the most potentially harmful.”
Predicting how trees will grow could help guide tree-planting efforts in urban areas such as New York City
Yukinori Hasumi/Getty Images
Source: www.newscientist.com
