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OpenTrees: A data visualisation of publicly maintained trees around the world
- freyfogle 5y agoHere's an interview with Steve Bennett, the creator of OpenTrees, from a little more than a year ago: https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/opentrees https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/opentrees
- breck 5y agoNice find! Fun read.
- pvaldes 5y agoLooks like a great helper for wood thiefs. It only needs the right type of president turning a blind eye, once. It happens more often than people think
- cbenz 5y agoThis argument sounds to me like security through obscurity [1], the same way some people incriminate emergency evacuation maps of buildings when there is a shooting because they helped attackers find their way inside... Worldwide shared knowledge versus protection against potential attacks. > It happens more often than people think This argument seems to be a strawman, what is the real probability of a wood thief to commit their business, and in particular with the help of that map? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
- pvaldes 5y agoIt depends on the location, solid high probability for some areas, specially in the years of the big scam. I remember three perfectly healthy old lebanon cedars, maybe four, and one... not two, ancient beech vanishing like a poof at night from public parks just in my city in the last years. Trees with soft wood or palms (easy to transplant, not valuable wood) are always respected for some reason. Hard wood ancient trees or old conifers were systematically chopped down in other cities also. Is a pattern easy to follow. Always the same pool of species. And is not just in the public spaces. I remember also an old Mimosa tree, a cherry tree that I planted and was chopped in the weekend last month, and a lot of trees removed in the river bank in the last ten years under several excuses. Stealing wood or firewood is serious money and a low risk crime. Most people don't understand how expensive are those things. Or don't bother to say anything when one rare hardwood tree 100 Yo is replaced at night by two tiny 2 Yo, fast growing and cheap as a rat species. For most people all trees are the same green thing. The statistics say that the number of trees in the city increased by 2 and everybody is satisfied.
- legulere 5y agoIn the end security always works by making life harder for attackers. Cryptography works by obscuring the private key, you can just try out all possible keys, but that is made so difficult that it’s practically impossible. All bike locks can be broken, but already the weakest will prevent opportunity thefts. Security by obscurity makes sense when you don’t have other means. I find the parent comment very weird. Wood thieves go into forests, and would probably be deterred by other people living in cities.
- stevage 5y agoThe data is all open data. If someone was interested in somehow vandalising a certain species of tree near them, they could already find the data on their local open data portal.
- polyterative 5y agocool finally found out the names of the trees beside my home in Bologna
- FreshFries 5y agoIncredible... I am flabbergasted that 1: this data is collected and shared, 2: there is some good soul who figured out how to gather these sources and make it available to the world. I would love an app that lets me walk my city, picture trees and expand the data set.
- breck 5y agoI highly recommend “picture this”. It’s AI tree identification is so good! It doesn’t let you link to open trees though, afaik. Maybe they would be willing to add that.
- stevage 5y agoTell me more about how you imagine this app working? (The "good soul")
- FreshFries 5y agoTake a picture of a tree, have it identified & published with location in / on OpenTrees.
- sva_ 5y agoThere's a bug where it shows the city of Troisdorf in the southern part of Netherlands, while it should actually be between Cologne and Bonn.
- stevage 5y agoCan you please report it? github.com/stevage/openTrees/issues
- ablaba 5y agoHere is a similar site for trees in Bangalore. https://sites.google.com/site/ramanarunachalamhome https://sites.google.com/site/ramanarunachalamhome
- Dylanfm 5y agoLovely project. Something that jumped out to me as I browsed around Edinburgh is the app highlighting Japanese Knotweed as a "very rare" tree. It's actually a very invasive species that's almost impossible to get rid of.
- johnofthesea 5y agoMaybe rare in database. As example Vigeland park in Oslo, there is tree row with similar trees but one has typo som is marked as rare.
- stevage 5y agoYep, the definition of "rare" is literally how many instances of that exact species name in the database. You can have extremely common trees marked as "rare" if they are rarely planted in urban contexts.
- pvaldes 5y agoIs not a tree and is a huge headache, yep. It depends on the location. What is normal for Europe can be a economical sink hole in US.