A team from Cornell has developed a digital twin web tool to track and simulate shading effects from every tree in New York City.

The tool is part of a larger effort to mitigate urban heat islands, which are primarily asphalt and concrete environments that retain heat and provide shade.

The team made bespoke tools for parsing lidar data from the City of New York, and the goal is to provide green spaces that both don’t retain heat and provide more shading.