In an era where cities are scrambling to meet sustainability goals and reduce their carbon footprint, a Belgian startup is leveraging artificial intelligence to revolutionize urban forest management. Grality, a tech company, has developed a sophisticated application that's helping municipalities and private entities alike to quantify, manage, and optimize their arboreal assets.
"When you have thousands of trees, you have a wonderful asset that makes the quality of life better," explains Cedric Van Daele, General Manager of Grality. "It's cooling the ambient air in summer, storing carbon dioxide, producing oxygen, and enhancing biodiversity. But you hardly measure that."
This lack of measurement has long been a stumbling block for cities trying to justify the considerable expenses associated with maintaining urban forests. Grality's solution aims to bridge this gap, providing concrete data on the environmental benefits of each tree while simultaneously streamlining management processes.
At the heart of Grality's offering is its AI-powered inventory system. Using satellite imagery as a base layer, the application can detect and geolocate thousands of trees within minutes – a task that would typically take teams weeks or months to complete manually.
"The AI completes it all in minutes," Van Daele states. "And then the teams can focus more on the biology and the quality."
Once the initial inventory is established, field teams can easily update and expand the database using a mobile application. The system calculates key metrics such as carbon dioxide storage, air quality improvement, and biodiversity enhancement for individual trees and entire forest areas.
For cash-strapped municipalities, Grality's platform offers more than just environmental insights. By providing a clear overview of maintenance schedules, work orders, and resource allocation, the system helps cities "save budget, improve quality, or both," according to Van Daele.
The application's features include the ability to prioritize tasks, track completions, and facilitate communication between teams and contractors, which have the potential to significantly reduce inefficiencies in urban forest management.
While Grality's current customer base is primarily concentrated in Europe, with cities like Brussels and Saint-Germain-en-Laye already on board, the company's expansion into Asia signals growing global interest in smart urban forest management.
The platform's appeal extends beyond municipal governments. University campuses, private estates like the Château de Versailles, and even large-scale landscaping contractors are finding value in Grality's offering.
As carbon markets mature and expand globally, Grality's precise carbon sequestration data could prove invaluable. While Van Daele notes that European clients haven't yet leveraged the platform for carbon credit trading, the establishment of a carbon exchange in Taiwan last year highlights the potential for such applications in the near future.
Grality's approach underscores a growing recognition of nature-based solutions in the fight against climate change. "All the technologies in the world to reduce carbon, to capture carbon – in fact, in the end, it is still the sun of our nature, the photosynthetic function of plants, that is the best, strongest," Van Daele reflects.
As cities worldwide grapple with rising temperatures and air quality concerns, Grality's innovative blend of AI, mobile technology, and environmental science offers a promising path forward. By transforming urban forests from mere budgetary line items into quantifiable, manageable assets, the company is helping to green not just cities, but the approach to urban planning itself.
