Urban greenery does not only contribute to the attractiveness of urban spaces but also impacts public health conditions. Image source: Shutterstock (#309126485)
Researchers in California have created a new tool to correlate trees’ locations with medical data from Kaiser Permanente (the largest HMO in the United States). This project tracks urban forestry to analyze the impact on health expenses. The goal of researchers is to advocate for more urban trees to reduce medical costs. They also plan on working out an online cost saving estimation tool that helps communities make decisions on implementing urban green spaces. Communities will then be able to use an online data tool to assess the health savings they can achieve by planting trees. The data tool allows communities to paste in community data on housing density and sociodemographics and is thus able to evaluate the Return on Investment ratio of a tree-planting campaign. By gradually adding more data of various cities to the dataset allows a representative overview of the situations of urban greenery in neighborhoods in different cities in the U.S.
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