 So thank you very much for this opportunity for me to join as a keynote presenter on this topic of more inclusive cities. So I'll be talking about urban green issues, you know, the pressing issues at the moment and participatory solutions in many parts of the world and especially in Asia. And, as Simone mentioned, I'm with pictures foundation and also tie of our culture association during my keynote presentation. I will also have Frank master of bueno, a planet geo USA who has been working with victories and here in Bangkok BMA doing tree inventory and to canopy assessment so rejoining later as part of the keynote. So, we can. So, I'll just mention a little bit. Again, before we go into the specifics of includes inclusivity, which is urban issues in in Asia. Of course, the issue of urbanization of no population and other problems are not unique to the world. But to get more specific, according to the Asian Asian Development Bank, three of the top five carbon dioxide emitters and among the most polluted cities in the world are in Asia. And on top of that many cities have been built, you know, in the deltas of rivers. And, you know, to link to, you know, the parts would link to the global economy so we're very flat thrown, as you can see in the photos in my slide and this one is actually not this year but you can see this kind of flooding in Bangkok quite a bit. And on top of that, another, I guess, general problem, you know, the common problem is that low income areas generally tend to have less access and have less of a, you know, in terms of access to green public spaces. So, but then again, you know, the situation is not all that hopeless and everything points towards cooperation, you know, working different parties working together different sectors, coming together and sharing their resources. And, you know, looking around of course these days you have to go around virtually. And I'd like to talk to bring up some very nice examples from Europe. First, to show that the trend is definitely more towards more inclusivity, and especially bringing different parties together to create one common space that can benefit as many as possible. Excellent project is in Fedora, Spain. And this is quite a few years ago when the residents proposed to the city that the existing sports center in the city should be turned into partially at least into a green public space. And before that, only members who pay fees are allowed. So, you know, after working with authorities, the landscape architects and, you know, other fellow residents, they finally have been able to turn a part of that sports center into a public park and area with 8.2 hectares on the river and complete with sports facilities. And another thing is, which is, I think for me is a popular trend right now is to convert existing spaces, you know, oftentimes underutilized in cities and making them more useful, make them more accessible to more people. And this is the Oasis school yard project in France, in Paris, and they're now going to different schools and working with students and residents to turn open spaces in schools into green spaces that not only beneficial to students but also to vulnerable populations, especially the elderly, you know, especially during heat waves, so they have some place to cool off. So we're not talking about, you know, an expensive design or not necessarily looking for, you know, a big amount of money to buy new land but converting existing spaces into, you know, a more public that can benefit as many people as possible. Closer to Bangkok in Asia, again, that site, the paper by the Asian Development Bank, you know, we're seeing governments, people, NGOs coming together and trying to change their urban environments. Like the top photo is from Wei in Vietnam, where neighborhoods are being revitalized also in Malaysia. Another example is from Udon Thani in northeastern Thailand. It's that picture probably not a very, you know, something we would be proud of in Thailand, but but we're working on it as you can see the access to that green space in the back is not all that great. So the city, the local authorities are doing walks, you know, photo voice walks with the residents as well as doing a mental mapping by interviewing visually challenged participants, you know, residents of their town to describe, you know, mentally describe a mental map of the specific challenges that they have when they try to get to a green space and of course, footpath access is, you know, a challenge for many people and hopefully the city will take these findings from from public participation to improve their green spaces. Now, bring it even closer to this meeting are some of the issues or a situation that we experienced in Bangkok. And as a resident here myself, we hear all the time that a top complaint by Bangkok residents is that we have to fuel public parks, we may have a number of big parks, but you know, we would like to see more and more of them and many times you see narrow green strips along utility lines that are not very easy to maintain. But of course, we're getting good news this year and this year as you will find out later on at the virtual field trip on Friday that that bank always is getting at least two, three very big parks and that's a good news for the city. But the problems that we encounter all the time is land availability. And we can certainly use more help from landowners and landscape architects to help identify land and available spaces and you know the sustainable designs for upcoming these spaces. The downside is that when you talk about public budgeting, you know it seems that you know we may be seeing construction of roads and bridges or then green spaces so we have more systematic collaboration, you know among different parties, especially public advocacy groups, I think we can see more public spaces being created by through participation. So for Bangkok and again, probably the same for many other cities that when it comes to regulations, you know we seem to have a lot of it on paper, you know regulations against destruction of green space trees or public land encroachment. We need to step up on enforcement and at the same time, the public, you know, like people civic organizations like like big trees and others we need to be more, you need to keep staying vigilant and watch out for any damage of public green property. So where do we come in. I would like to say that we've come quite a long way in terms of our culture in Thailand, although it's still in initial stages. What we're trying to do is to help resolve conflicts between communities and developers as well as authorities we have a partnership of over 70 organizations, which are called the Thailand Urban Tree Network and we part for instance is part of this network as well. And we have a pretty good relationship with authorities. And as well we go and into different places and working with local authorities and even training the locals, the staff on how to better protect their trees. Maybe eventually becoming arborists so they can protect their own green spaces better. Like the lady in the top photo is one of the average that who are working with the association. And you might see these men in the green t-shirts they're actually surveying trees along Pattaya Beach. And what happened there was there was an attempt to cut down all the trees along the beach, and it was a public uproar so organization as well as Thailand, Thai, our Association of Landscape Architects went over and we spoke to the authorities and they've stopped the cutting of the trees and and working with us to train their staff. And also coming up soon. We have just been contacted by the Thai National Environment Board that they would like us to help with the project to save and also rehabilitate trees that are habitats to a native species of parrots in Nantaburi which is close to Bangkok so we will try and do that you know to make sure the trees are strong and also working with the locals to how to better care of those parrots trees. In terms of professional standards we work with the ISA the International Society of our culture universities in Thailand as well as the Thai professional qualifications Institute to established our culture as an essential job and part of an essential part of green maintenance. So you can see we this is when we went to Atlanta for an ISA leadership meeting and my pictures are showing you know the training and inventory and kind of be mapping that we're starting in Bangkok and the various meetings we're having so that our culture will become a more sort of recognizable profession in the near future. So I will actually break here so that Frank from Planet Geo can come in and talk a little bit more about work together on online tree inventory and kind of be mapping and I'm going to stop sharing my screen briefly and Frank will come in with his own slides so I'll be back in a few minutes. Thank you Raya and Frank over to you and be mindful of time Frank sorry to be a pest. Absolutely, I can move quickly. Thank you Aurya and hello everybody it's a pleasure to be joining you. I'm happy to share the experience that I have in making trees a bigger part of our cities and making sure that our cities are more inclusive to incorporate everybody and provide better access to all the benefits that trees provide. So I'll get right to it a little bit about my background. I got my career started conducting tree inventories and surveys right after college. Did that for a few years and kind of just eventually work my way up to be the urban forester for the state of Rhode Island the United States. After going back to school get an MBA. I joined Planet Geo. I have been with the company for almost three years now started working with cities universities and tree care companies to just implement software and data collection analysis solutions to improve the status quo of their programs whatever that may be for their program. Now I work with our international partners to do the same and Aurya, our partners and clients, Aurya falls under that category, and we've been supporting her work accordingly. So just a little bit more about the company we are a United States based company with partners all across the world. We have tree and asset management software. We do tree inventory and assessments, we provide geospatial mapping services and also urban forestry consulting plans. If you need a management plan any type of consulting services. We do. We've got four different software products. I won't really talk much about that. But you can definitely check it out if you'd like to take a look on our website. So the basics. Basically, I had thought about how do we improve the process of improving the status quo of our cities. When we have very limited resources and we're on a meeting with Dan land the president of the Harvard days foundation within the past year, I asked him that question and he actually said, you know it's imperative that you build a narrative and you can be able to tell a story. And why is that. Well, because the story is really how you connect data is a critical element of that story to how do you tell a compelling story. Well, really ultimately with data and we, we build a narrative with that data that helps us demonstrate progress and what types of data do we use. Well, typically we use either a tree canopy assessment or a tree inventory. And that gives us a snapshot of what the city is looking like. The tree canopy assessments, just a real brief breakdown of the difference. It's more of a top down now looking at the city from the top. It's, it's using satellite data. We're really just quantitative we're quantifying how much of the city is covered with tree canopy, and how much might be covered with other types of land cover. We can't distinguish one individual tree from another, and the tree inventory is a is a different process we're looking at things from the bottom up. And it's a quantitative and a qualitative approach but it does require manual data collection requires an arborist to visit and assess every tree. So accordingly, we can look at a lot more pieces of information like be she's health relative age so on and so forth. And so again just kind of some images to illustrate the concept. When we're looking at a tree canopy assessment we're looking at the city from the top down, and when we're doing a tree inventory, we're walking around and looking at individual trees. And just to give you a better ideas, the difference between a tree canopy assessment and tree inventory. This is a just quick little gif that demonstrate demonstrates how we can turn satellite imagery of a city into land cover classification the dark green as you can see his trees the light green the other vegetation that tan color would be just kind of like an open lot blue would be water buildings are red roads are black so on and so forth. So if we get this imagery we can actually break this down by any different geography and that's how we get meaningful insights. And so this right here is a visualization tool of a canopy study, and you can see how we can isolate different neighborhoods. These are actually census block groups which is the United States census performed once every 10 years it collects data on all facets of demographics of the country like average income health data so on and so forth. There's a reason why we break those, why we tend to break this canopy study down by those neighborhoods, and we'll see that in the next slide. So we can look at the way tree canopy covers change over the course of a number of years, but really this is where we get the most actionable insights is, we're able to incorporate any other data that we might have associated with those neighborhoods, and use these sliders to prioritize that. If we look at, we have data for these neighborhoods as to the percentage of the population in each neighborhood that's living below the poverty line. We can prioritize that. And as already mentioned before, we're basically discovering now as we're doing these analysis technology is really only been available in a resolute enough form to be able to provide meaningful analysis for about 10 years. So what we are discovering is indeed lower income neighborhoods generally have less tree canopy cover, and may have more health problems such as asthma as a result. So we can really drill down into, if I only have a limited amount of funds, how do I move things forward. So just an example of a tree inventory, we're looking at individual pieces of information on an individual tree. Ultimately, we get a compilation of the data that provides us insights into how our urban forest is doing. Well, what about the real world swaying public opinion or any opinion is hard. How do we do that. Well leadership supports what they know. And without information problems are nebulous. So roadblocks become a reality and not everybody, as already even previously mentioned is able to go out and get all the data they need right at the beginning. But we can be more inclusive by putting good information out to the public and public opinion always sways political opinion. So information is key. Get it however you can. And even if you're on a tight budget will take a bite sized approach. And we've seen a lot of cities be very successful with this, this approach. It's basically the creation of a virtuous cycle, you invest in good information, even if it's just a little bit. And even if you're you're collecting yourself and it's in a small area. That allows you to make better decisions and obtain better results to demonstrate the value of good information. And we can just do this in a number of different ways. We can, again, continue to provide this information and move the conversation forward. Some examples would be a representative sample, you can go out and represent just examples of the city. You can do a point based survey like you find in a free tool, like the itree tools that are put out by the US Forest Service, anyone in the world can download them and use them. And you can even collect data in, in pilot areas. And that's actually what we're in very early conversations where he's just into about doing in the city of Bangkok is an inventory and a canopy study in a very small area. Once we get some data, there's many tools we can use to put it out there. Software we use has a community engagement map it's a map you can put in any website. We can look at tree inventories it's just simplified for members of the public to be able to look at and gain some actual insights. This is what the canopy study looks like. A couple of cool examples the city of Palo Alto, they'll actually pay to put a tree on private land. So long as the landowner agrees to take care of it, and they use this software to log watering activities for the grants that fund these tree plants. We can also crowdsource pieces of information. For example, this is an organization in Belgium, that is using the software to crowdsource potential planting locations from citizens they've got about 11,000 trees and the software now 11,000 potential planting locations in Belgium. So that is the speed version. Hopefully, that was wasn't too fast but if anybody has any questions at the end about some of these more technical elements, my email address is up on a slide feel free reach out. Thank you very much Frank that was fast but intense. Yeah, back to me back to you and if you could please try to wrap up in, and I say three four minutes. Okay. Sorry, I'm going to have to sharing Frank. This is a, this is a for me. Sorry, it's presentation on your screen. We were actually we're sharing. All right. So thank you Frank and I like Frank was saying that we were, we are working together doing a pilot project on surveying trees doing tree and for Tory and tree canopy mapping right now but on their very small scale to begin with so we hope to expand that kind of work for better tree space management in Bangkok and elsewhere in Thailand. And of course, another very important partnership that we have in, including you know involving community engagement as much as possible would be the landscape architects, and we're just upon from we part to say I will be talking later about they've been working hard, engaging communities landowners and even doing crowd funding so that we can have more pocket parks around Bangkok and and we hopefully we park will expand to other cities in Thailand as well. So as a result of we park and their partners, they've been able to bring green spaces to lower income areas, you know with affordable solutions and with community input. And as you can see from from the photos that you know the, the residents are very interested you know once the one of the pocket parks were completed you know the children came and it became suddenly became very popular for the residents so that I think it's great that we're not just looking at big huge parks but also pocket parks here and there that are maybe more common in Europe or in the States but Bangkok is certainly coming along with collaboration among different parties. And so I think I'm almost done with my presentation and I would like to say that we will certainly learn so much more from this meeting, and also from the successful cases that will follow, but certainly you hang on a little later. My panel discussion will come up with some very specific details on cities and inclusivity, and this includes couldn't just upon we park and also he's also an landscape architect. Here's Fatima from Peru, we're talking about her urban greening initiative in Lima, and Roslan Jacob from the Malaysia for a culture association. And so I will end my presentation now and head back to Simone and thank you very much for having me here.