HUGS - Holistic Urban Green Services

HUGS (Holistic Urban Green Services) is a service from GMATICS for managing municipal urban greenery, developed with funding from the European Space Agency (ESA). It addresses the difficulty municipalities have in keeping an up-to-date picture of their tree assets and in judging what green interventions achieve.

The service is built on satellite imagery and satellite-derived products together with LiDAR data, processed so that public administrations can use the results in their day-to-day work. Using AI techniques, it provides a tree census and inventory, including trees on private land and classification by genus and species, continuous monitoring of tree health and water needs, and monitoring of pollution and heat waves together with the capacity of greenery to mitigate them, including super-resolved nitrogen dioxide (NO2) air-pollution maps. A what-if analysis estimates the benefits of planned new green areas, and green indicators compare conditions between periods, for example before and after new planting. Information on ecological networks across the municipal territory supports the identification of animal habitats.

Small, medium and large municipalities can use the results in the HUGS webGIS platform or have them integrated into their own systems and databases. Cities involved in the ESA-funded development included Milan, Rome, Florence, Bergamo, Prato, Pescara, San Benedetto del Tronto and Fano. GMATICS states that the land surface temperature algorithms developed in HUGS led to an operational urban heat island monitoring contract under ESA/IRIDE, active across 52 Italian cities. The service was designed with agronomists, arborists and planners, with AlberItalia, RDM Progetti, Stefano Boeri Architetti and the SmartCommunitiesTech cluster taking part.