Blaz Klobucar

My academic background includes a blend of environmental science, sustainable forestry management, and urban planning, but I settled on urban trees to be my core interest.  

As a researcher, I am passionate about using my expertise to address pressing challenges related to urbanization, biodiversity conservation, and climate change adaptation. Previously my research topic was residential urban forests, the socio-ecological interactions as well as assessment of ecosystem services that are provided by trees growing on private residential property.

Currently, I am preoccupied with mapping how urban tree canopy cover has changed in Malmö, Gothenburg and Stockholm from the 1960s to the present using deep learning applied to historical aerial imagery. The project produces city-wide canopy change maps to support stakeholder workshops with urban planners and evidence-based urban forestry policy in Sweden.

My career research ambitions lie at the intersection of remote sensing, urban ecology and planning practice. I aim to develop scalable methods for monitoring urban green infrastructure across temporal and spatial scales toward longitudinal analyses that can inform how cities plan, manage and advocate for urban forests over decades. A core interest is communication for bridging the gap between computational methods and planning practice: making remote sensing outputs easy to understand and actionable for the practitioners and policymakers who need them. 

In the longer term I am interested in expanding from canopy cover mapping toward individual tree-level monitoring, integrating deep learning with LiDAR, multi- and hyper- spectral imagery and citizen science data to build living urban tree inventories that update continuously rather than through costly periodic surveys. I see potential in applying these methods across Nordic and European cities to generate comparative evidence on how urban forest trajectories relate to governance structures, planning traditions and climate adaptation ambitions.

Awarded the following FOMA grants:

• Monitoring the provision and condition of high‐value restorative outdoor environments with remote sensing and Volunteered Geographic Information. 6-month grant, 2022
• Urban Tree Detection in Historical Aerial Imagery of Sweden. 6-month grant, 2023

Guest lecturer and teaching assistance in the following courses:

• Landskapsförvaltning & Skötsel av grönytor och naturmarker (Landscape Management course)
• Trädvårdskursen (Tree care course)
• Urban Forestry - management of urban forests and trees
• Advanced Digital Landscape Analysis (ADLA) with GIS course

Course leader:

• Independent project in Landscape Architecture (EX1011) in the international Bachelor’s program Forest and Landscape
• Urban Tree Assessment: Data-Driven Decisions for Urban Forest Management (MOOC, under construction, available early 2027)

• Philosophy and Ethics in Science course
• Course in Grading and Assessment
• Teaching in Higher Education, basic course
• Doctoral co-supervision course