Desert Botanical Garden is a 140-acre nonprofit botanical garden in Arizona known for its botanical research and conservation programs. Previously, the garden used outdated paper-based mapping workflows to manage its facilities and 50,000 desert specimens from around the world. Today, DBG staff are creating a more accurate representation of the garden using digital maps powered by GIS technology to help manage and conserve the garden. The staff uses centimeter-precision Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver devices from Bad Elf and mobile Esri GIS apps to create a digital twin and geodatabase of the garden’s specimens. GNSS receivers empower GIS and survey professionals to collect high-accuracy field data using any phone, tablet, or laptop. By having accurate plant data up to one centimeter, DBG staff can easily locate plants, run reports on their health, assign tasks related to the plants, and add pins to note damages or layers for future tasks. This data-driven digital twin is essential for managing the health of the collection.

The Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA) aims to preserve the country’s natural resources and biodiversity within a context of sustainable development. As part of the Ministry of Environment in Egypt, the agency is concerned with introducing and integrating environmental dimensions in policies and programs that protect human health and manage natural resources. Nature reserves are crucial in securing and maintaining ecosystem balance, protecting essential habitats, building resilience to climate change, providing global food security, maintaining water quality, and conserving natural resources.

Egypt’s nature reserves are essential to its culture and climate resiliency. However, climate change has increasingly impacted the ability of the environmental agency to manage and understand biodiversity. To meet its strategic objectives, the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA) and Strategize It Egypt implemented geospatial technologies, allowing accurate analysis of areas to help the government make critical decisions about preserving these natural areas. The new management solution, using Esri software, supports the EEAA team in creating an environment of increased productivity by building, developing, collecting, updating, and managing the geographic data of Egypt’s nature reserves. As climate and biodiversity concerns are at the forefront of our lives, this geospatial database for Egypt’s Natural Reserves solution will encourage more governments, regionally and globally, to see the value of GIS in helping shape a more sustainable planet.

On July 31st, 2023, SatVu’s satellite HOTSAT-1 captured thermal data within Fresno, California. The data showed a cool blue zone aligned with the neighbourhood of Fig Gardens. This area is known for its high density of mature trees, as seen in aerial data.

Fig Gardens, developed in 1910 north of Fresno on previously unused land covered with hardpan, was revealed to have sandy soil beneath. The developer planted fig, eucalyptus, cedar, oleander, and shade trees, then sold the land to new residents who built homes and created a community. In 1919, the remaining land was subdivided into residential lots to develop a suburban environment. Today, large mature trees are a defining feature of Fig Gardens and contribute to its community feel.

Fig Gardens is a desirable area to live in but has a high price tag. The median home price in Fig Gardens is $715,000 compared to $396,000 for the rest of Fresno. Additionally, there is a disparity between this area and the rest of Fresno due to past discriminatory policies.

The history of Fig Gardens and Fresno is fascinating. Thermal imagery from SatVu highlights the benefit of planned urban greening to reduce the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. UHI contributes to heat-related illnesses and deaths and impacts a city’s economy through increased strain on energy infrastructure and the liveability of its citizens. SatVu is developing data and insight products to enable city managers to understand, manage, and mitigate the heat risk in their community.

TPL developers designed ParkServe, an Esri-powered GIS tool and comprehensive database of local parks in nearly 14,000 US cities, towns, and communities. City leaders and park advocates can access TPL’s extensive database of local parks to guide improvement efforts and quantify and measure park inventory quality. ParkServe data underpins TPL’s engagement with cities. A few years after recovering from Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans became one of the first TPL Climate Smart Cities partnerships. Causing more than 1,800 deaths and $125 billion in damage, Katrina was a harbinger of the disruptive weather events that would increase with climate change. As the city prioritized improving climate resilience, TPL facilitated the creation of “green schoolyards,” replacing concrete surfaces prone to flooding with gardens of native plants that absorb rainfall and runoff. Several other interventions, including wetlands restoration and stormwater catchment basins, also addressed flood concerns while increasing open space access for neighborhoods that did not previously have it.

Trees make cities more resilient to floods, attenuate the effects of heat waves, regulate air quality, and create healthier and more livable environments. In Mendoza, Argentina, Bentley and GenMap built a city-scale reality model of the region’s green infrastructure using mobile mapping technology, identifying and mapping one million trees using object feature extraction. The project digitalized, geo-referenced, and obtained the dimensions of each tree and surrounding roads and sidewalks in the area to manage the green infrastructure remotely. The resulting database enables efficient management of the health condition of each tree.