Gliwice Builds AI-Assisted Digital Twins of Its Street Trees

Gliwice has launched a project set to change how the city manages greenery along its roads. Zarząd Dróg Miejskich (ZDM, the city's municipal road authority) is scanning trees growing in road strips and building digital twins of them, with artificial intelligence meant to help specialists assess the condition of individual specimens.

The goal is a precise, digital inventory of the trees growing along streets, that is, where a tree's condition has direct bearing on the safety of drivers and pedestrians. Instead of paper documentation and manually kept registers, the city is building a database in which every tree has its own digital counterpart with a full set of parameters.

How the Scanning Works

The process begins with field scanning that creates a detailed digital map of the tree population growing in the road strips of the four Gliwice districts covered by the first phase. The collected data feeds into a system that assigns each tree a location, species, crown and trunk dimensions, and an initial condition assessment.

This is where artificial intelligence comes in. Algorithms are meant to support specialists in analyzing the collected data, helping assess the health of individual trees and plan further maintenance work. The tool doesn't replace arborists, but is meant to speed up the review of large numbers of specimens and flag those that need closer inspection first.

An accurate, up-to-date inventory can help spot trees that need inspection faster - Zarząd Dróg Miejskich w Gliwicach

Safety Comes First

Roadside trees are pieces of urban infrastructure that drivers and pedestrians encounter every day. A weakened trunk, a rotten branch or a damaged root system can become a hazard during strong winds or storms, which is why regular inspection of trees along busy streets is a priority for road authorities.

The digital database is meant to make it easier to compare tree condition over time and catch, faster, those that are losing health from one period to the next. Instead of site visits and handwritten notes, officials gain a tool for comparing data across successive measurements and prioritizing interventions where risk is rising fastest.

Gliwice Compared to Other Cities

Gliwice isn't the first Silesian city to turn to digital twin technology. Rybnik is already running a considerably broader project that involves scanning more than 500 kilometers of city streets and building a full 3D model of the city in partnership with the Silesian University of Technology (Politechnika Śląska), aimed at optimizing administrative decisions and resident services. The Gliwice project is narrower, focused solely on roadside trees, but fits the same trend toward digitizing the management of urban infrastructure.

Other Polish local governments are testing similar solutions too, though usually in the form of classic greenery inventories without AI support. What sets the Gliwice project apart is that data analysis is meant to be partly automated, which, given the large number of trees to check, could meaningfully cut the time needed to flag priority cases.

What's Next

The city hasn't yet said exactly how many trees the first inventory phase will cover or when the project will expand to other districts. Nor has it disclosed the technology supplier or the cost of the undertaking. If the model proves itself in the four pilot districts, though, the natural next step would be extending the digital inventory to all trees along Gliwice's roads.

For residents, the payoff is meant to be practical: fewer surprises from branches suddenly falling and more predictable maintenance planning, since the city will have up-to-date knowledge of tree condition instead of relying on spot checks.