Falling trees are a persistent hazard in São Paulo, damaging property, cutting power and occasionally costing lives. A team of biologists and engineers at the Universidade de São Paulo has now demonstrated a technology that could make the city's canopy safer: terrestrial LiDAR scanning that converts a living tree into a detailed three-dimensional point cloud, revealing its structure with a precision impossible to achieve by eye.
In a proof of concept published in the journal Trees: Structure and Function, the group scanned a Tipuana tipu on USP's Butantã campus and analysed how pruning decisions alter the tree's mechanics. Removing a branch creates topological asymmetry that makes the tree more susceptible to wind damage, so the team's algorithm searches for pruning plans that minimise structural weakness while ensuring no more than 20 per cent of the tree's total mass is removed.
The approach has limits. Scanning a single tree at the level of detail used in the study takes about 40 minutes, and the models do not yet capture roots, even though roughly 30 per cent of tree falls in São Paulo are root-related. For now the technique is being used for monitoring and cataloguing, but the researchers' ambition is a practical pruning tool that helps municipal crews leave trees more resilient, not less, after every intervention.