TreeCop

TreeCop - Development of a Sentinel data-based control tool, to determine drought stress of the urban tree population in the city of Essen - function assurance and success monitoring for site-optimising measures against the background of increasing drought phases in climate change is a cooperation project with the city of Essen.

Subproject 1: City of Essen, FKZ 50EW2010A

Subproject 2: Evaluation of remote sensing data (University of Trier), FKZ 50EW2010B

In the drought years 2018 and 2019, the city of Essen spent 1.2 million euros on watering urban trees. In order to optimise irrigation management in the face of climate change and to ensure urban climatological and health functions of urban tree populations even during long periods of drought while conserving drinking water resources, the proposed project will develop a control tool based on Sentinel-2 data that regularly determines the drought stress of urban tree populations on a comprehensive basis. Data from networked soil moisture sensors and airborne hyperspectral data will be used to support this. Sentinel-2 has proven its worth in determining drought stress and the current vitality of trees. However, since the temporal and spatial resolution of Sentinel-2 is not sufficient to record the vitality status of every tree on a daily basis, a classification of the drought stress sensitivity of the urban tree population will be created from all data sources. In this way, all stands of the affected classes can be watered in stress situations without the need for daily satellite data of the entire area. Sentinel-2 data from later points in time will be used to monitor the success of the irrigation measures. The procedures are to be developed on CODE-DE or GDI-DE and can thus also be made available to interested communities.