In cities facing rising heat and shrinking biodiversity, the most powerful climate infrastructure might be the one outside your window: a mature tree.
Jan Willem de Groot, CEO of Terra Nostra in the Netherlands, has spent decades shifting from tree removal to tree protection. Today, he’s using LiDAR technology to scan thousands of urban trees — not to automate care, but to enable it. By identifying which trees are healthy and which need attention, his team can focus on defective but savable giants that provide outsized ecological benefits: cooling streets, storing carbon, intercepting stormwater, and sheltering wildlife.
But the real transformation isn’t just technical. It’s emotional.
Jan Willem has seen firsthand how trees become living reminders of someone worth remembering. When people build relationships with trees, they don’t just live near them — they protect them. That insight has inspired a new kind of urban forestry rooted in care, not control:
- Policy that discourages unnecessary removals
- Incentives that reward long-term care
- Stories that help people see trees differently
This approach is reshaping Dutch municipal planning. Instead of counting stems, cities now measure crown volume — the true ecological mass of a tree. Removing one mature tree might require 50–100 saplings to replace its function. Once planners see the volume loss, they choose to keep the tree.
As Jan Willem puts it:
“Most trees are healthy. Experts should spend their time on the few that truly need attention.”
This is the shift we need in Canadian cities too — from planting to protecting, from risk management to ecological stewardship. If we want cities that stay livable under rising heat, we must radically protect the mature trees we already have.
To explore Jan Willem’s full story and the technology behind his work, read the original article on Internet of Nature: 👉Don’t Count Trees, Count Crowns