Bangkok Turns to AI and LiDAR Mapping

Bangkok Turns to AI and LiDAR Mapping

Bangkok turns to AI and LiDAR mapping to fix its weak, uncounted urban forest, promising safer streets and a high-tech defense against deadly air pollution.

Traditionally, checking tree inventory and evaluating the condition of trees are time-consuming and cost-constrained. The maintenance is very expensive because one has to visit every tree in proximity, then decide if maintenance needs to be done. But the Smart Tree Inventory (STI) uses a ground-based car-mounted mobile laser scanner—a 3D scanner and a panoramic camera—to capture trees very quickly.

Mr. Peter Sassi, Vice President of Greehill Asia-Pacific Pte—a Singapore-based tech company specializing in mapping, monitoring, and managing urban tree and green assets—explained that STI provides information analyzed with artificial intelligence. “This information is prepared for the experts so that they can focus their attention on the trees that actually need help and focus the limited maintenance efforts on the trees that actually need help,” Sassi said during a talk entitled “Urban Forests for The Future: Global Lessons and Local Actions for Bangkok.”

The technology acts like a diagnostic tool for the city’s green infrastructure. Sassi likened the process to high-tech medical imaging: “You can imagine this that this is like a whole city MRI machine and then we go to the three doctors who decide what should be the treatment because currently you either go for one tree and treat it but that’s very expensive or go for the entire district but you have to over-treat it.”

Measurable Impact: Safer Streets and Cost Savings

The adoption of AI-powered technology immediately translates into better public safety and significant cost reduction for the city. Globally, STI has proven its ability to flag dangerous trees before they cause harm. The technology’s predictive analysis minimizes the risk of incidents and property damage, leading to an over 80% increase in safety for communities where it is deployed.

Simultaneously, the STI drives efficiency by allowing city maintenance crews to move from reactive, district-wide over-treatment to targeted care. By focusing resources only on the trees that the AI has highlighted with issues like significant lean angles, diebacks, or structural defects, cities can achieve up to 30% savings on maintenance costs. Sassi emphasized the long-term benefit: “If the bad things already happened, it’s a lot of cost to clean up afterwards. But if you just

have to do some pruning before, it’s much easier.”

Local Crisis: Air Pollution and the Uncounted Forest

Bangkok’s move to a data-driven system is critical because its urban forest faces unique, severe environmental pressures, particularly from PM2.5 particulate matter.  Trees are one of the city’s most vital defenses against this deadly air pollution, but the city cannot manage what it cannot measure.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Chairat Treesubsuntorn, Head of the Remediation Laboratory at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, highlighted the urgency: “You could see like in Bangkok we face to many pollutions such as a particulate matter during the winters.” He noted the current manual method—where arborists must check tree height, diameter, and leaf count one by one—is impossible at a city scale. “Imagine if you have to walk to the tree and then you have to check… and then you have to do it one by one,” Dr. Chairat stressed.

Local experts estimate that of the city’s approximately 3 million trees, fewer than 1% have been electronically documented. This massive data gap prevents Bangkok from strategically using its green assets. Dr. Chairat explained that the technology is necessary to apply his lab’s findings on effective local species: “We have a very high diversity of the tree species and we need to we cannot use the references easily from the publication or from research in other countries.”

Bridging the Gap through Collaboration

Successful implementation hinges on collaboration among the private sector, academia, and local communities. Santi Opaspakornkij of the Big Trees Foundation emphasized that while the current governor’s initiative successfully planted over a million trees quickly, the real challenge lies in long-term, specialized care.

He pointed out that the city’s existing trees are often “big, it’s old, but it’s also not very strong” because roads and buildings were constructed later, unintentionally weakening the root systems. To address this, collaboration and technology are key. Santi noted that international partnership often helps to bring about change locally: “When you know that  your international friends the visitor the western expert tell you the same thing that some Thai organization has been telling for many years you now listen more.”

The new technology serves as the essential tool to unify these efforts, providing the objective data needed to transform the urban forest into a measurable and actively managed municipal asset.

A Shift to a Data-Driven City

The move to a Smart Tree Inventory signifies more than just an upgrade in city maintenance; it represents a fundamental shift toward making Bangkok a data-driven, resilient city.  By embracing this technology, the city transforms its neglected green assets into a crucial part of its infrastructure, actively improving air quality, enhancing public safety, and safeguarding its citizens’ health. This cross-sector collaboration provides the precise, objective knowledge base necessary to manage the entire urban forest proactively, ensuring that Bangkok’s next million trees are not just planted, but scientifically positioned to thrive and deliver maximum benefit to the community for generations to come.

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