Orenburg state university

City residents will make planting better online

The group of specialists from Environment and Natural Resources Management Department — Marina Glukhovskaya, Tatyana Evstifeeva, Marina Garitskaya, and Irina Stepanova have worked out a project to optimize planting of any urbanized area by means of a web-application. It will allow to plant city with trees more effective. One of the project’s advantages is that it is open to residents of a city, as well as professionals. The project has been already presented on Agency for Strategic Initiatives (ASI) platform.

“Compliance with landscaping standards does not always provide comfortable urban environment because even abundant planting can be distributed unevenly. A comfortable environment is extremely important for urban agglomerations located in steppe area with its extreme amplitude of climatic parameters fluctuation” — said Marina Glukhovskaya.

The project’s developers believe that introducing an effective planting is a multidimensional and specific assignment for each city. It requires joint activities of the organizations that provide urban development, academic community representatives, and city residents. Today all the planting issues in Russian cities are handled by landscape architects and designers, urban development and planting workers, building companies and managing organizations. By now, neither urban ecologists who can address all the changing environmental parameters, nor city residents participated in urban beautification. The web-application can help to solve the problem.

The authors expect it to be easy to use. All residents would have an opportunity to take part in planting, even the ones who has low level of computer literacy.

As a result, the city landscape will be changed and new easy to read environmental maps will account for climatic, soil, and anthropogenic factors.