Automated Hazard Rating Assessment of Roadside Trees Using MUTIS ver 1.0

Despite providing benefits in the forms of green landscape, human health, storm water management, carbon storage, etc., roadside trees are also potentially hazardous to their surroundings. Hence, there is a need to determine hazardous severity of these trees. Hazard rating assessment in the context of urban trees is the evaluation of the hazard by trees and how likely they are to fail as well as how severe in terms of damages that they could cause to their surroundings. In this study, roadside trees hazard rating was assessed automatically using a customized ArcMapTM and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), known as Malaysian Urban Trees Information System (MUTIS), developed by Faculty of Forestry, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM). The study determined the accuracy of MUTIS in generating hazard rating assessment. The study area covered parts of UPM’s academic zone. Results depicted that out of 909 trees assessed, 99.8% (907 trees) were categorized as ‘Medium’ hazard, while no trees had ‘Low’, ‘High’, and ‘Severe’ hazard rating. In this study, MUTIS assessment achieved 93.75% accuracy. Upon deriving hazard rating assessment, abatement activities were subsequently prescribed, in which the activities were mainly tree pruning with specified direction and intensity. This study indicated that MUTIS ver 1.0 can be an alternative tool to determine hazard rating of roadside tree.