Questions & Answers
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to common questions from municipal forestry staff, parks managers, IT teams, and procurement officers evaluating Civic Forestry & Urban Canopy Manager.
Civic Forestry is a GIS-native urban forest management platform built specifically for Canadian municipalities. It replaces paper forms, disconnected spreadsheets, and ad-hoc GIS layers with a single system covering tree inventory, ISA TRAQ risk assessment, permit management, planting programs, canopy analysis, ecosystem service valuation, and reporting — all from the office or the field. Delivered as a full source code licence.
The platform is designed to manage inventories from a few thousand trees in smaller municipalities to 500,000+ trees in larger urban centres. The interactive map uses clustering at high zoom levels for large inventories and individual-tree display as users zoom in. Spatial queries execute in under 500ms on full inventories thanks to PostGIS R-tree indexing.
Yes. Risk assessments follow the International Society of Arboriculture Tree Risk Assessment Qualification methodology. Each assessment records the assessment level, target identification, likelihood of failure, likelihood of impact, and consequences — producing a risk rating of low, moderate, high, or extreme. Assessor ISA credentials are verified and tracked. All assessments are immutable for liability defence.
Yes. The platform imports tree inventory data from Shapefile, GeoJSON, CSV, and database extracts with spatial validation and duplicate detection. Trees are rendered on the municipal GIS basemap and integrate with parcel fabric, road centreline, and aerial imagery layers. The tree inventory can be published as a managed feature layer for cross-departmental GIS access.
The system ingests aerial orthophotography or LiDAR point-cloud data and applies classification algorithms to delineate tree canopy polygons. Total canopy cover is expressed as a percentage of land area with breakdowns by ward, neighbourhood, and land-use category. Multi-year comparison enables change detection — tracking canopy gain and loss over time.
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