IDTREE: a mobile app for the management of urban trees

Abstract

In Urban Forestry, the inventory and assessment of the phytosanitary status and risk situations of plants are essential on management, contributing to the knowledge of tree conditions and to the choice of interventions to be performed. These studies are usually time-consuming because they require careful analysis of field data and additional time for registration in a digital format. In order to reduce the time taken to register the field data a mobile application based on the AppSheet® platform (www.appsheet.com) was developed. This application was used in the evaluation of 24.360 single trees carried out in the Oporto city parks. The IDTree application allows the digital registration of the dendrometric and phytosanitary variables of trees, the registration of photographic records of the overall state or particular conditions of trees, and their georeferentiation, being able to read information from QR-Code tags. The IDTree is a valuable resource in fieldwork of urban forestry studies, allowing to substantially reduce the time spent with the transcription of data from paper record to a digital medium. It also contributes to the best systematization of data, facilitating their editing process during fieldworks and its further analysis.