Development of a GIS Application for Urban Forestry Management Planning

Green spaces are indispensable for the urban ecosystem. Benefits coming form trees, parks, urban and peri-urban woods can be the mitigation of temperature, pollution decreasing, protection from water run-off and soil erosion, aesthetics increasing and quality of places, providing a place for recreation, education and learning. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) helps cities manage forestry projects efficiently and reduce management costs. This paper presents the development of a GIS application for urban forestry management. For developing the GIS application, Geoserver, PostGIS/PostgreSQL, OpenLayers, GDAL, PROJ.4, and Entity Framework 5.0 were used. Further ASP.NET MVC4 was used for developing the web site of the application. The GIS application that was developed is an independent window application, which run in every modern computer with no need to be connected to any other software. Such a GIS application must do, this one supports the authorities to choose appropriate measures for urban forest management, protection and utilization by connecting attribute to spatial data. Conclusively this GIS application is an appropriate tool for Municipality Administration Services in cooperation with researchers and concerned citizens, for contribution to a better management of urban forests, providing urban population with better living conditions.