University of Richmond
IN-50: Innovation D

In the summer of 2012, two first-year students in the  Spatial Analysis Lab  used summer funding from the university to begin mapping campus trees. A little over a year later, they had mapped over 700 trees and used that information to make estimates of biodiversity and carbon storage on the university grounds.

Taylor Holden's ('15) award-winning poster, shown below, summarized that work for the Southeast Division of the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting. These spatial data were used by the  Earth Lodge Living and Learning Community  to estimate that forested portions of campus like Westhampton woods contained almost ten times the amount of wood per square foot than the rest campus. The data were also linked to a website,  Trees and Shrubs of the University of Richmond Campus , that was generated for campus nearly a decade earlier by another student, Tiho Kostadinov ('02), under the supervision of  Dr. John Hayden , a professor in the department of Biology.

In 2016,  Dr. Todd Lookingbill , an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Sustainability, began using the tree mapping exercise to illustrate basic concepts of field collection and spatial analysis in his introductory physical geography course. Dr. Lookingbill published a chapter in an e-book by ESRI ' STEM and GIS in Higher Education ' chapter 14 titled "Biodiversity and Carbon Content of Trees on a University Campus".

Every year since, students have been collecting tree data on campus and analyzing it using GIS. This hands-on learning activity provides students the opportunity to be data creators, managers and analysts, start to finish. The current introductory physical geography course, GEOG 250 Planet Earth: Wind, Water, Fire is offered in the Fall and Spring semesters through the  Department of Geography, Environment and Sustainability .

In addition,  biology classes  offered by Professors Emily Boone and Jennifer Sevin, have also mapped trees on campus with a special interest in Red maples and the timing of color changes and the onset of falling leaves.

In the summer of 2020, recent Biology graduate Valerie Galati was awarded a SMART Fellowship to organize the data, analyze patterns, and make the results more accessible to the public. Products from her work include the UR Tree Inventory  GIS dashboard  and a comprehensive video about the project, shown below.

During the summer of 2021 Erica Hidinger-Wood from Midlothian High School assisted Dr. Lookingbill by taking field notes and mapping select trees on campus. The project gained further momentum in the fall of 2021, as the Eco-Corridor construction was completed and the team sought to map and place metal identifying tags on every tree in this space to track their condition over time.

At about that same time, Tom Eliseuson, a student with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UR joined the project as a volunteer. He worked with the  Spatial Analysis Lab 's GIS Operations Manager  Beth Zizzamia  to develop a data collection method to assist biology and geography classes in the Eco-Corridor mapping. In the spring of 2022, Shreya Muralidharan, another local high school student, volunteered with Tom to help with the tagging and mapping. Having completed that task, he has moved on to other areas on campus and to date has added an additional 5,300 trees to the database!

This mapping effort allows the university community to connect with the natural landscape and the history of the campus. For example, 37 trees and shrubs within a site on the southeastern side of Westhampton Lake that was once a  burying ground  for those enslaved by former landowners were mapped to provide historical and present day context for the site. The ages of " witness trees ", including a white oak estimated to be 210 years old, are included in the map.

As of July 2024, over a hundred and fifty different species were observed and over 7,300 trees had been mapped. The UR Campus Tree database will continue to evolve as more trees are catalogued and existing trees are remeasured for growth and updated health condition. Beth Zizzamia and SAL intern Katie Camera ('26) are the current managers of the spatial data and web products. Current student researchers on this project include Laneah Gordon ('25), Maya Basnyat ('26) and Emery Elkinson ('27).

This collaborative project also involves community members not affilated with the University that aid in the data collection and has provided opportunity for volunteers to engage as well as classes to engage in this work. 

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/d2b3363e7a9f4f2d9c661880016be966

https://urnow.richmond.edu/features/article/-/22590/tree-mapping-project-shows-a-dynamic-new-view-of-campus.html?utm_source=as&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=features-story