ASM
Singapore Plants Trees in GIS
Singapore was not always known as the Garden City.
In 1963, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew recognised the importance of greenery as a factor in attracting foreign investors, so he launched a tree planting campaign.
| Modern Singapore is a city of trees. GIS is required for their health and management. |
However, the investors came faster than the trees, resulting in a modern landscape that was heavy on development and light on vegetation. That was until 1976, when the Parks and Recreation Department was formed and began planting trees and shrubs around the island.
Simultaneously, the Ministry of National Development initiated road codes, which mandated that adequate planting areas be provided along new roads.
An island-wide parks program led to the improvement and creation of National Parks. Developers of residential areas were required to plant roadside trees and set aside land for open space.
By the mid-eighties Angsana, Rain Tree, Yellow Flame, and Mahogany trees and vines such as Bougainvilleas and Ficus pumila provided visual relief from expanding structural development, turning Singapore into the Garden City that Yew had envisioned.
Singapore still continues its planting practices. The Singapore National Parks Board (NParks) supervises 1.3 million trees located in 300 parks and on more than 2400 ha of roadsides using a GIS.
NParks uses GIS to link attributes to location data, such as trees to parks and to roadways. It can then layer that information to provide a better understanding and visualisation of how objects are spatially related.
NPark’s GIS, known as the Park Integrated Management System (PRIME), is a custom software application built and hosted on an ESRI ArcGIS Server platform.
NParks and other government agencies in Singapore share information through a common GIS called the Land Information Network (LandNet).
LandNet hosts a basemap containing layers such as roads, buildings, waterlines, parks, and of course, trees. Updates in the tree layer of PRIME go directly to LandNet, thus any tree data imported into PRIME becomes visible in the LandNet environment.
Through LandNet, Singapore’s Land Transport Authority, Urban Redevelopment Authority, and Land Authority access NPark’s tree data regularly. For safety reasons and as reference to help preserve trees in the construction of new roads, as well as in the widening of existing roads, it is crucial that the Land Transport Authority knows where each tree is located along Singapore’s roads and railway infrastructure.
It is also useful for the Urban Redevelopment Authority to know where trees are located when planning new housing or business developments. This information can be accessed and viewed from desktop computers or it can be used to produce paper maps.
Nparks uses mobile computers in the field to record data about trees. NParks field crews use hand-held computers, equipped with ArcPad, ESRI’s mobile software, to log data related to the position, size, health, and species of each tree.
Once data is entered, the GIS integrates with the database to generate a unique ID to each tree and stores it in the PRIME geodatabase.
NParks began using GIS to capture tree locations in early 2000, and currently most of the road way trees and trees in the abutting open spaces have been recorded. A smaller percentage of national parks trees have been catalogued in the PRIME database due to other constraints.
NParks is not currently using its GIS to help manage tree trimming cycles, although the technology exists. When asked if a GIS workflow is in the future for NParks, Tee Swee Ping, NPark’s Assistant Director of Streetscape Tee says, “NParks is seriously looking into upgrading the current GIS in PRIME so as to use more of the advanced features in GIS.
‘We know there are many more capabilities in the technology, but right now the important thing for us is capturing the location and the health conditions of each tree.’
