In Berlin, 12,000 volunteers water trees through a platform — The Guardian

In Berlin, Germany, 12,000 registered volunteers use the Gieß den Kiez platform, which helps coordinate the watering of urban trees during hot periods. The interactive system tracks more than 900,000 trees in the city and calculates their water needs based on age, species and local rainfall, The Guardian reports.

Data on water needs

The platform shows when a tree was last watered, allows users to register new watering and identify trees most in need of water through colour-coded markers. The service also provides advice on watering techniques, rainwater collection and the locations of urban water pumps.

Special attention is given to young trees: they do not have a developed root system and therefore need more frequent watering. Volunteers’ work complements the efforts of district services that care for thousands of trees but do not always manage to provide watering during Berlin’s increasingly hot summers.

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The project has operated since 2020

Gieß den Kiez was launched in 2020. The largest annual volume of watering — nearly half a million litres — was recorded after the platform’s launch at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. During heatwaves, user activity increases: on 27 June, when the temperature in Berlin reached a record 39.9°C, city residents poured a total of 8,000 litres of water onto trees.

The platform’s open-source code allows other cities to create their own versions of the service if they have data on local trees. Such platforms have already been launched in Potsdam, Leipzig, Magdeburg and Paris’s 17th arrondissement.