How Plano Turned a Resident’s Question into a 3D Shade Tool

Serving a community located just 20 miles northeast of Dallas, the City of Plano has spent decades building one of the most respected park systems in Texas. The city’s parks are more than recreational amenities. They reflect Plano’s commitment to quality of life, continued economic vitality, and long-term stewardship of public infrastructure. As surrounding communities continue to grow rapidly, Plano has entered a different phase of its evolution. Rather than focusing on expansion, city leaders are concentrating on reinvestment, modernization, and actions ensuring that existing infrastructure continues to serve residents at a high level.

For the Plano Parks and Recreation Department, that commitment extends beyond playgrounds, trails, and athletic facilities. It includes investing in data, technology, and the systems that help staff understand and manage the city’s assets. One example of that effort is the city’s 3D shade map.

“We are proud of our team’s willingness to leverage existing information and technology in pursuit of quality-of-life initiatives that move the needle. And this new tool does just that,” said Dr. Ron Smith, director of parks and recreation.

According to Smith, technology has become an essential part of how the department continues to improve service delivery.

“Plano Parks and Recreation is an award-winning municipal agency recognized across Texas and the nation as an industry leader in public parks and recreation service delivery,” he said. “For the past six decades, Plano Parks and Recreation has focused on providing exceptional services to the community, always striving to improve the quality of life of each resident. Leveraging technology in pursuit of customer service excellence continues to be a priority within the organization, and the creation of this unique, interactive shade tool speaks to that commitment.”

Plano’s commitment to technology is closely tied to its broader Green Infrastructure Management Program, which treats the urban forest as critical community infrastructure rather than simply a collection of trees. Plano’s parks and open spaces currently contain approximately 33 percent canopy cover, with the potential to support as much as 60 percent canopy coverage over time.

According to the city’s urban forest plan, Plano’s urban forest delivers an estimated $11.4 million annually in environmental, economic, and infrastructure benefits, in addition to carbon storage benefits valued at approximately $44 million. The city’s broader community urban forest is estimated to contain 1.7 million public and private trees with a replacement value exceeding $1.6 billion. 

Long before anyone discussed creating a shade map, Plano had already made significant investments in understanding, measuring, and managing its urban forest as critical community infrastructure.

One of the most important initiatives was the creation of a comprehensive tree inventory. Urban forestry staff used a desktop geographic information system (GIS), ArcGIS Pro, to document more than 43,000 individually maintained trees throughout the city, capturing detailed information about species, condition, size, maintenance needs, infrastructure conflicts, and environmental benefits.

For Marc Beaudoing, urban forestry manager, the inventory was about much more than counting trees. “Completing a tree inventory provides the City of Plano with a baseline on how to manage our urban forest and is often one of the first steps when implementing an urban forest master plan,” he said. “The data we collect includes tree species, size, infrastructure conflicts, targets, disease and insect problems, and many other data points. The tree inventory allows us to tell the story of each individual tree, how we manage the trees, [and] money spent on tree care and gives us the overall environmental benefits that trees bring to our community.”

The inventory helped transform that vision into actionable data, giving staff the information needed to manage trees as infrastructure assets while aligning daily maintenance activities with long-term canopy, sustainability, and quality-of-life goals. The inventory became a cornerstone of Plano’s Green Infrastructure Management Program and urban forest plan. Serving as a 25-year road map for managing and expanding the community tree resource, the plan promotes collaboration between engineering, planning, sustainability, public works, and parks staff.

To support those goals, Plano integrated its urban forest inventory with ArcGIS Enterprise to connect GIS, urban forest, and work management data. The created framework links daily maintenance activities with long-term planning objectives. The result is a shared information environment that allows departments to monitor assets, coordinate work, measure performance, and make more informed decisions about the city’s green infrastructure investments.

What no one realized at the time was that this work would eventually make entirely new applications possible.

As Plano expanded its use of technology, staff focused on building stronger connections between operational data and GIS.

Under the leadership of the asset management team, information from work management systems, inspections, and asset inventories became increasingly integrated and available across departments. According to Natalia Faulkner, asset management supervisor, that effort was never about creating a single application. It was about creating an environment where good information could support better decision-making.

The effort was part of a larger initiative to create what staff describe as a collaborative information delivery platform. Asset management, GIS, urban forestry, planning, engineering, and operations teams increasingly began sharing information through common data structures and workflows. User dashboards, performance metrics, inventory assessments, and scheduling information helped transform operational data into a resource that could support both strategic planning and operations.

The city spent years refining data collection and data architecture, improving synchronization processes, and establishing what staff describe as a “single source of truth” methodology within the city’s enterprise asset management  environment. That work required rebuilding and restructuring datasets so that information remained consistent regardless of how it was queried or where it was consumed. This is foundational to establishing effective data governance and maximizing the investment in data management.

The result was an environment where operational information could flow naturally between asset management systems and GIS, making it easier for planners, managers, and executives to understand what was happening across the organization.

The idea that sparked the project did not originate within the city’s GIS team. It came from a resident. A resident asked whether the city could provide a way to visualize shade along park trails.

At first glance, the request seemed straightforward. In reality, answering it required combining information from multiple systems and representing it in a way that would be both accurate and intuitive. For many organizations, such a request might have resulted in a future project proposal or a long-term capital request.

For Plano, the necessary pieces already existed. The city had a detailed tree inventory. It had GIS. It had elevation information. It had a team willing to explore new ideas. Most importantly, it had the data.

Using the city’s GIS and enterprise asset management foundation, City of Plano GIS analyst Dianna Stiller began turning the concept into reality. What followed was approximately two months of experimentation, refinement, and problem-solving.

The final solution combined tree inventory data, enterprise GIS datasets, lidar-derived elevation information, and ArcGIS software’s 3D visualization capabilities to create a public-facing experience through ArcGIS Online that residents could access from their computers or mobile devices.

“The project combined data from multiple city departments—including Parks’ tree inventory data, enterprise GIS datasets, and citywide lidar-derived elevation data—to create an interactive 3D experience in ArcGIS Experience Builder,” explained Stiller. “One of the primary technical challenges involved integrating and optimizing data from multiple sources while balancing realism, performance, and usability in a public-facing web scene.”

The resultant application allows users to explore trails, view shade conditions, and interact with individual tree assets.

“The project also required creative approaches to representing generalized wooded areas, modeled tree canopy, and 3D shade visualization using both inventoried trees and polygon-based features,” Stiller added.

Unlike a traditional map, the experience feels immersive. Users can navigate through parks, examine tree canopy conditions, and understand how shade influences different areas throughout the park system.

Shortly after its launch, the shade tool began receiving attention from residents and city leadership. Usage spiked after public announcements, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. More importantly, the tool quickly began serving purposes beyond its original intent. What started as a resident service evolved into an awareness, transparency, and accountability platform.

Leadership began using the application to better understand conditions throughout the city’s urban forest. Staff used it to verify information, identify discrepancies, and respond more quickly to questions about park assets.

Those benefits extended well beyond the shade map itself. Through the city’s broader asset management initiative, operational dashboards now support scheduling, inspections, performance measurement, and cross-department collaboration. By pushing work management information into GIS, Plano has created greater visibility into priorities, bottlenecks, and ongoing activities while improving its ability to communicate outcomes to leadership and residents alike.

For David Angeles, retired assistant director of Plano Parks and Recreation, that accountability aspect became one of the project’s most important outcomes.

“Plano’s urban forest is a critical community asset, with more than 43,000 individually maintained trees forming a core part of the city’s canopy,” he said. 

By making information more visible, the city enhanced collaboration between staff and residents.

“The shade map tool also gives Plano residents an opportunity to help monitor the accuracy of the city’s urban forest data and support ongoing updates to the map,” Angeles added. “In that way, the tool holds us accountable and serves as a crowdsourcing resource for maintaining an accurate urban forest inventory.”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Plano’s shade tool is that it was never intended to become a flagship initiative. It emerged as a byproduct of years of work focused on improving data quality, integrating systems, and strengthening operational awareness.

That idea is something Faulkner believes is true of innovation in general.

“What makes it all possible? Innovation rarely comes from a single source; it’s not an application you can buy, not a person you can hire, not a process you can implement. Innovation most often results from an unexpected combination of smaller ideas, and it is always bigger than the sum of those parts,” she said. “In public service delivery, every effort must be made to direct innovation to measurable process improvement that meaningfully contributes to the city’s economic vitality, the quality of its infrastructure, its ability to attract businesses, and the overall well-being of the community.”

The shade map is a clear example of that philosophy in action. A resident asked a question. The city already had the data. The team had the skills. The systems were connected. The answer became a tool that serves residents, improves transparency, and supports future planning.

Plano officials see the shade tool as a starting point rather than a finish line. Future opportunities include expanding 3D visualization of park amenities, exploring additional public-facing experiences, and continuing to leverage GIS as an effective communications and system-of-systems platform.

The broader lesson is not about creating a shade map. It is about creating an environment where innovation can happen. As Faulkner reflected, “This project demonstrates how intentional data management through enterprise asset management and GIS platforms drives partnerships, resulting in collaborations that can turn questions into answers.”

That is ultimately what happened in Plano. Years of investment in data, people, partnerships, green infrastructure management, enterprise asset management, and GIS created the foundation for innovation. The shade tool was inspired by a resident’s question, but it emerged from a broader strategy focused on infrastructure stewardship, collaboration, and building systems capable of answering questions that had not yet been asked.