The Carbon Natural app
What it is
A tree replacement calculator
What it does
All too often we see trees removed from urban settings to make way for urbanisation, new houses and population growth, or simply because sometimes people just want to cut down a tree. Trees give us a range of benefits such as cleaning the air, intercepting rainwater and of course sequestering atmospheric carbon. When a tree is removed, we lose all these future benefits which take many years to replace. As we learn more about the environmental impacts of humans on our climate, we're seeing legislation introduced to meet carbon neutrality goals. Trees are becoming increasingly important in our struggle to reduce our carbon footprint and will be one of our biggest assets to tackle climate change. Carbon Natural estimates the amount of carbon sequestration a tree will achieve in a given period of time, and subsequently estimates how many trees will be needed to offset that carbon footprint when it is removed.
How it works
We've run several hundred tree-growth simulations using i-Tree Eco's forecast model outputs, and generated algorithms to predict size and stored carbon for a range of tree species, using only trunk diameter measurements (DBH). The baseline data from which the models were run was collected from over a thousand measurements from over 200 trees. If this sounds like a time-consuming and complicated task, then you'll be pleased to know that we've done all the hard work for you and all you need to do is measure the tree and make a few guesses about how long you think it might live for. Be sure to check out the tutorial in the video below (COMING SOON).
What it doesn’t do
Carbon Natural was designed to help make urban forest decisions for typical urban trees. Most urban trees fall within a set of size limits which vary by species, and these are the trees Carbon Natural was designed to process. It hasn't been designed to cope with mature forest trees, or traditional forestry operations.