Valuing Green Infrastructure Through Tree Assessment TooLs (VITAL)

近年来，与经济学家合作的环境和社会科学家已经开始理解自然为社会提供的价值。这些“生态系统服务”包括提供食物和燃料、调节水质和水量、减少污染、储存碳以及产生具有文化和美学意义的景观和特征。利用一系列得到广泛认可的方法，可以对这些服务进行经济价值评估，而可再生能源的存量被称为“自然资本”。这些理念使自然被纳入组织和社会计划和决策的方式中。例如，侵蚀自然资本的经济发展可能被认为是不可取的，特别是如果自然资本的损失超过了发展的好处。另一个术语，绿色基础设施(GI)是用来描述自然或半自然的特征，如树篱、公园和行道树，它们构成了人类景观的一部分。GI可以提供生态系统服务，因此增加了自然资本。例如，城市树木可以调节水流，吸收二氧化碳，可以减少空气污染，并具有文化意义。尽管这些想法在理论上发展得很好，但事实证明，将它们应用于实践更具挑战性，因为计算ES估值所需的数据并不广泛，使用的方法也很复杂。这是政府和企业在其规划和决策中理解和使用这些重要想法的障碍，对于可能对其环境的真正价值感兴趣的个人公民、小组织或社区团体来说更是如此。这个至关重要的项目由来自开放大学的具有运行大型公民科学项目经验的环境科学家、森林研究公司的ES和树木专家以及TreEconomics组成，TreEconomics是一家社会企业，在让组织参与评估他们的树木方面发挥了重要作用。我们的目标是开发一种系统，允许从个人公民到地方当局、企业和大型组织的任何人都可以评估他们周围的树木。我们将显著改进现有的OU公民科学工具：‘Treezilla’，它允许用户绘制并给出树木的ES评估，以便它与最广泛使用的ES树评估专业系统：i-Tree Eco相关联。这些改进将使所有用户都可以使用强大的工具来为树赋值。我们将设计这些系统，以便将数据从一个系统馈送到另一个系统，随着Treezilla收集到更多数据，这些数据将用于进一步完善系统。我们工具的价值将被大量个人和组织使用，因此我们与对其环境中树木的价值感兴趣的关键组织合作来交付该项目。我们将与公园信托基金米尔顿·凯恩斯密切合作，他们负责英国树木最茂盛的城市之一的GI，以了解组织如何使用Treezilla，利用我们所学到的知识来改进培训和向其他用户推广Treezilla。然后，我们将与一个主要的政府组织：威尔士自然资源公司密切合作，向该组织和其他类似组织提供演示Treezilla的具体项目。通过与树木理事会的第三个伙伴关系，我们将把我们的工具和我们所学到的知识传达给大量潜在用户。树木理事会有数十名成员，由地方当局、社区团体和大大小小的慈善机构组成，并支持一个由8000名志愿树木管理员组成的全国网络。这些人，以及Treezilla的所有用户，将可以免费和开放地使用树木估值工具，并同样可以访问来自英国各地的大量且不断增长的树木和树木估值数据集。

In recent years environmental and social scientists working with economists have begun to understand the value that nature provides to society. These 'ecosystem services' (ES) include things like the provisioning of food and fuel, regulating water quality and quantity, reducing pollution, storing carbon and producing landscapes and features of cultural and aesthetic significance. Using a range of widely agreed methods it has been possible to put economic values on these services and the stock of ES is referred to as 'natural capital'. These ideas have allowed nature to be included in the way that organisations and societies plan and make decisions. Economic development, for example, that erodes natural capital might be considered undesirable, especially if the loss of natural capital outweighs the benefit of the development. Another term, 'green infrastructure' (GI) is used to describe the natural or semi-natural features such as hedgerows, parkland and street trees that make up part of human landscapes. GI can provide ecosystem services and therefore adds to natural capital. Urban trees, for example, regulate water flow, take in carbon dioxide, can reduce air pollution and have cultural significance.Although these ideas are well developed in theory, applying them in practice has proved more challenging because the data required to calculate ES valuations are not widely available and the methods used are complex. This is a barrier to governments and businesses understanding and using these important ideas in their planning and decision making, and more so for individual citizens, small organisations or community groups who might be interested in the real value of their environment. The VITAL project is made up of environmental scientists from the Open University with experience of running large citizen science projects, specialists in ES and trees from Forest Research, and Treeconomics a social enterprise which has been instrumental in engaging organisations in valuing their trees. We aim to develop a system that allows anyone from individual citizens to local authorities, businesses and large organisations to value the trees around them. We will significantly improve an existing OU citizen science tool: 'Treezilla' which allows users to map and gives ES valuations of trees, so that it links with the most widely used professional system for ES tree valuation: i-Tree Eco. These improvements will give all users access to powerful tools for valuing trees. We will engineer these systems such that data from one feeds into the other, and as more data are collected in Treezilla, it is used to refine the system further.The value of our tools will be in their use by large numbers of people and organisations, so we have partnered with key organisations with interests in the value of trees in their environment to deliver the project. We will work closely with the Parks Trust Milton Keynes who are responsible for GI in one of Britain's most wooded cities, to understand how organisations can use Treezilla, using what we learn to improve training and promotion of Treezilla to other users. We will then work closely with a major governmental organisation: Natural Resources Wales to deliver specific projects demonstrating the use of Treezilla to that organisation and others like it. Through a third partnership, with The Tree Council, which has tens of members made up of local authorities, community groups and small and large charities, and supports a national network of 8000 volunteer Tree Wardens, we will communicate our tools and what we have learned to a very large number of potential users. These, and all users of Treezilla, will have free and open access to tools for valuing trees and the same access to a massive and growing dataset of trees and tree valuations from across the UK.