Section: Quest 1 - Roadside Trees 🌳🌲 | BRITQuests - find your bioresources

The BRIT contains data of the roadside trees within the several cities in Germany. During the very first task you will be asked to find one tree on the street of your choice and some information about it.🌳 After that You will get a dose of knowledge📚 about bioresources and what can we do with them, so that after creating your own statistical data📊 you will be able to calculate and see the size of benefits from trees residues🍃. But let’s go slowly from the beginning…

Select activity Task 1 - Find your tree🌳🔎
Task 1 Find your tree 🌳🔎

If you live or study within the borders of German cities included in the roadside trees map on the BRIT, find the tree near your home or university. If not, find the tree of Your choice to get some tree information ℹ️.

Please find the instructions below. However, try to complete the task independently first. If you run into any issues, check the instructions for help🤗.

The map of roadside trees in the BRIT contains data from various sources. For example, the data of roadside trees in Hamburg is comprised of two merged datasets:

The Hamburg roadside cadastre, which is maintained by Hamburg's authority on environment, climate, energy and agriculture (BUKEA) and

the hamburg port authority roadside tree cadastre, which is maintained by the Hamburg Port Authority (HPA).

It contains all locations of roadside trees in the city state of Hamburg including information about tree genus, year of plantation, stem circumference and crown circumference.

All used sources are marked in the BRIT.

Instruction for quest 1.1 by Ewa Wronka and Phillipp Lüssenhop (CC BY)

Cool! You have found your own personal tree and additionally, some information about it. You should know that this tree produces leaves🍂 and is cut every once in a while, which results in green waste generation. But let’s stop for a moment and think… How much green waste can produce only one tree? Not so much, right? So now, in order to calculate some statistical data, you will be asked to find a specific number of trees in the region defined by You 🫵🏼.
Select activity Task 2 - Find more trees! Define a region🌍

Task 2 Find more trees! Define a region🌍

The BRIT Tool allows the user to create and save its own region on the website, which can be used later on in the exercises.

In the second task You will be asked to define Your own region with some specific parameters, namely the region containing a number of trees between 1000 and 5000.

Instructions for quest 1.2 by Ewa Wronka and Phillipp Lüssenhop (CC BY)
Select activity Great! Until now you have defined a region with a ...

Great! Until now you have defined a region with a number of trees, which you will use in the later part. But let us stop here for a minute and think about the amount of bioresources produced by those trees 🧐.
Select activity Learnings

What actually is a bioresource❓
Bioresources are renewable materials derived from biological sources, serving as alternatives to fossil raw materials. They include high-quality primary materials from forestry and agriculture, such as crops and trees, used for food, building materials, paper, and base chemicals. Bioresources also include secondary, tertiary, and quaternary materials - by-products and residues generated during production and after product use. These can be food waste, straw, liquid manure, tree prunings, wood residues or others.

If you want to learn more about bioresources, there is a separate topic in the “Lectures for future” module. Feel free to check! - Lectures for Future
Select activity What do you think? In our exercise we have growing...

What do you think? In our exercise we have growing roadside trees. They lose leaves every fall and they need to be cut every few years for road safety. If we want to work with residue-based bioresources, what will we take under consideration?
Select activity Quiz
Select activity At this moment you know that trees can generate gr...

At this moment you know that trees can generate green waste, which are our residue-based bioresources. Additionally, you have found your own statistical data. Now let’s check how you can make use of them.
Select activity Learnings

One way to make use of tree residues, like leaves🌿 or branches🪵, which are part of green waste is to apply them to compost or biogas plants. What is happening with green waste added to biogas plants? Green wastes in our case especially leaves, together with other residues like biowaste or paper are decomposed by anaerobic bacteria and one of the products of anaerobic digestion is biogas - methane⛽💚. Whereas hard green waste like branches, which are not decomposed by anaerobic digestion, can be added to the compost to produce high quality fertiliser.
Select activity Task 3 - Calculate the biogas and compost potential

Task 3 Calculate biogas and compost produced by the tree residues from Your region! ♻️💡

Now, after defining the region, You will calculate the biogas potential of the tree's residues (leaves) produced within Your region during fall. Moreover, older trees are pruned every once in a while, from which additional bioresources are produced (pruned material like branches). Taking it into consideration, You will also calculate the averaged compost production from those branches.

Tree prunings contain branches, which are typically chipped. These wood chips are a good structure material for composting. Composting wood chips alone is not ideal, due to the lack of nitrogen and they should be mixed with another nitrogen-rich substrate. The same applies to the production of biogas only from leaves. It will not be the ideal process and it is necessary to add other substrates to increase efficiency and quality of the end product. Having this in mind You can still make a raw estimation of compost and biogas production. Use the assumptions below:

Assumptions for biogas production from leaves:

Leaves produced by one tree → 70 kg/1 tree
Biogas potential for 1kg of leaves → 95L/1kg

Assumptions for compost production from pruned material:

Amount of pruned material from one tree (older than 10 years) → 10kg/year
Compost produced by pruned material → 50% of the mass.

Instruction for quest 1.3 by Ewa Wronka and Phillipp Lüssenhop (CC BY)
Select activity As you can see, bioresources don’t need to be spec...

As you can see, bioresources don’t need to be specifically grown🪴 but many residues🍂🪵 from other processes are generated and must be managed anyways. Making the shift from viewing these residues as waste🗑️ that is a cost to be disposed of, in many cases it makes sense to find a way to create value⛽ from them.
BRIT can help you get an overview about which bioresources are available in your region.