6 ms·

London Street Trees

139 points by buro9 3y ago

blademaw 3y ago
Hey, I can shout-out my place of residence: Melbourne has one of these :-) http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au/ http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au/
zabzonk 3y ago
one thing most people don't realise is how much park and woodland london has.
- zzbn00 3y ago
  Yes, although on this map I think the trees in parks are not shown
  - gcoleman 3y ago
    It's based on data from councils and tfl, so council run parks are included (e.g. Gunnersbury near where I live) but not royal parks (like Richmond park)
    - jwestbury 3y ago
      Seems there are at least a few trees missing in some of the council parks near me, but most of them are there. Quite nice.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  And then there is the green belt around London. This sort of thing probably encourages building up not out which is probably a good thing.
hnbear 3y ago
London has a surprising history and love for its trees, more so than I've seen in other cities I've lived in. This means you can find a lot of fun listicles that provide history and fun facts for trees located around the city. For example, [Great Trees of London](https://londonist.com/london/maps/great-trees-of-london-map https://londonist.com/london/maps/great-trees-of-london-map) has a collection I'd actually enjoy walking around, and coupling with other sites in the area. Especially in the heat the difference trees make is incredible. Moving from a tree-lined street to an open one is horrible when walking around the place.
- sw104 3y ago
  Not to one-up you, but Sheffield in South Yorkshire has even more trees. I visited recently and was taken aback by how much coverage there was for a city center, coming from Leeds, which seems to hate trees. If I remember correctly, London has around 8.5 million trees (for a population of almost 9 million, 1:1 tree:person) and Sheffield has around 4.5 million (for a much smaller population of less than 600,000, 7.5:1 tree:person). Sheffield has more trees per person than any other city in Europe. Sheffield council tried to cut down thousands of trees a few years ago and it caused massive backlash, protests and arrests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_tree_felling_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_tree_felling_protest...
  - switch007 3y ago
    I can’t believe how long that saga went on! Sheffield residents are rightly extremely proud of their city. The trees are absolutely wonderful and their numbers make Sheffield quite special. Good on the protestors!
  - have_faith 3y ago
    I just came across this: https://sheffieldtreemap.com/ https://sheffieldtreemap.com/ More japanese cherry trees that I realised
conbandit 3y ago
New York City Trees https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/ https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/
- geospatialover 3y ago
  Here's a cooler (imo) visualization: https://willymaps.github.io/nyctrees/ https://willymaps.github.io/nyctrees/
burkaman 3y ago
This is an unusually nice website, but if you like this, check your own city, they might have one too! For example, here's: DC: https://trees.dc.gov/apps/3677bceead544db79a412e3ab0a68588/explore https://trees.dc.gov/apps/3677bceead544db79a412e3ab0a68588/e... Boston: https://boston.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=c9de58cb207f448a8212163812d91626 https://boston.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?... LA: https://losangelesca.treekeepersoftware.com/index.cfm https://losangelesca.treekeepersoftware.com/index.cfm
- gregsadetsky 3y ago
  Montreal: https://quebio.ca/en/arbresmtl https://quebio.ca/en/arbresmtl Quebec City: https://quebio.ca/fr/arbresqc https://quebio.ca/fr/arbresqc New York City: https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/ https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/ Paris: https://a3x.carto.com/viz/030b38b6-085f-11e5-8ac5-0e43f3deba5a/public_map https://a3x.carto.com/viz/030b38b6-085f-11e5-8ac5-0e43f3deba... London: https://apps.london.gov.uk/street-trees/ https://apps.london.gov.uk/street-trees/
- Retric 3y ago
  Interesting these maps are missing many trees such as the DC missing those around the the capital building. Presumably because different organizations are in charge of them.
  - nathancahill 3y ago
    When it's the building, the correct spelling is capitol.
    - Retric 3y ago
      Interesting, I’ve seen both used so often I just assumed either worked.
  - burkaman 3y ago
    Yes there is a different map for DC parks: https://caseytrees.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html https://caseytrees.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.h..., but it also doesn't have the ones right around the Capitol. I would guess that's because it is federal and not handled by the city? The White House is also not covered, but the Ellipse and the Mall right below it is.
londons_explore 3y ago
I bet this this website cost London £100k or more. They probably contracted it out to some supplier to build and maintain, and they are charging through the nose for hosting it, because the people on the London horticultural team don't do HTML. While I applaud the effort, I do wonder if it is tax money well spent. Perhaps a spreadsheet on a shared drive would have been better value for money?
- foota 3y ago
  Tbh I feel like that's probably an underestimate, but otoh that's probably a fraction of the cost of maintaining the trees themselves, so I'm not sure it's worth fretting over.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    And the whole point of having a government of London is because it's a huge city. If it was just a large car park it wouldn't need a government. The city is for people, and people both like trees and benefit from many properties of these trees such as their ability to absorb rainfall and provide shade as well as positive contribution to air quality (well, unless you're allergic to tree pollen) so it makes sense for the city government to look after them. This is therefore a reasonable expenditure of some government resources. Just as when they paid "Royal de Luxe" to perform The Sultan's Elephant over several days. The Sultan's Elephant is street theatre, an enormous mechanical elephant, a giant little girl, and some other apparatus turns up, the puppeteers from Royal de Luxe operate these puppets to tell a story for the entertainment of just... everybody who happens to be there, it's on public streets, it's not ticketed, it's not in some arena or screened off area, it's just in your city where you live and/or work. Perhaps you came specifically to this part of the city to see the giant little girl, asleep so peacefully, or perhaps you were surprised to find your journey interrupted by an enormous elephant walking down the street when you went to buy lunch, it doesn't matter, this sort of street art is a reasonable investment.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      I don't think any comment is being made on the utility or not of the trees. I think the comment is specifically about the custom built website to track and map the trees.
JimDabell 3y ago
See also: OpenTrees.org: 13,910,944 open data trees from 192 sources in 19 countries. https://opentrees.org https://opentrees.org https://github.com/stevage/opentrees https://github.com/stevage/opentrees
- larodi 3y ago
  A friend of mine is doing something similar to this London tree but another European capital. I really don't understand why would someone _not_ integrate or just expand opentrees.org. what is the point of having two openlayers websites? (unless of course the second is esri world atlas...)
- spandextwins 3y ago
  That is a really nice website! Wow!
Honest_Carrot 3y ago
Sacramento, CA: https://data.cityofsacramento.org/datasets/b9b716e09b5048179ab648bb4518452b https://data.cityofsacramento.org/datasets/b9b716e09b5048179...
jszymborski 3y ago
Huh, looks like Montreal has one of these as well... never would have known. https://quebio.ca/en/arbresmtl https://quebio.ca/en/arbresmtl EDIT: Wondering about the distinct areas without trees on the island? Those are buroughs that look as though they don't report to the City of Montreal. In the case of Westmount, it's because they are a distinct city.
physhster 3y ago
Funny how London cares about its trees while Paris does not.
- bullen 3y ago
  https://opendata.paris.fr/explore/dataset/les-arbres/map/ https://opendata.paris.fr/explore/dataset/les-arbres/map/
zabzonk 3y ago
i should point out that not all of the uk cares as much for its trees: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/06/sheffield-city-council-behaved-dishonestly-in-street-trees-row-inquiry-finds https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/06/sheffield-ci...
- have_faith 3y ago
  This is specifically the council. Local resident care an awful lot about their trees and there are many local campaigns to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again. I think the local labour party ended up replacing some of the MP’s involved. (I live in Sheffield)
- sw104 3y ago
  A select minority in the local council didn't care, but the citizens and those who protested (and got arrested) over this overwhelmingly did. Since the protests, the council stopped cutting the trees down and reversed course. Sheffield has more trees per person than any other city in Europe. Around 4.5 million trees for a population of 600,000 (7.5:1).
Angostura 3y ago
Worth noting that these are only the trees that line roads - so quite a few of those dark areas are actually parks and woods crammed with trees.
- BerislavLopac 3y ago
  Well, London _is_ technically a forest, after all... https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/did-you-know-that-london-is-the-worlds-largest-urban-forest https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/did-you-know-tha...
- astro- 3y ago
  Trees on private property are also missing — in front of people's houses/communal areas in front of blocks of flats. There's quite a few of those around me that I would consider to be "street trees". Pretty cool site, though!
- badcppdev 3y ago
  You're absolutely right. I think this is of trees that need checking and maintenance to keep roads, cars, pedestrians safe. Hence the URL /street_trees/ Parks and woods would be maintained in a different process. Obviously it's acceptable and even desirable to have fallen down trees in woods and some parks.
simonw 3y ago
I've been Git scraping the San Francisco version of this for a few years now. My https://github.com/simonw/sf-tree-history https://github.com/simonw/sf-tree-history repo now has 444 commits (most recent one was just 4 days ago) tracking every change that's been made to https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Street-Tree-List/tkzw-k3nq https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Street-Tree-List/... since March 2019. I haven't yet done anything with this data, but there is so much potential for visualizations and other fun stuff with it. If anyone wants to have a go please be my guest! Wrote more about this project here: https://simonwillison.net/2019/Mar/13/tree-history/ https://simonwillison.net/2019/Mar/13/tree-history/
- keepamovin 3y ago
  I love the idea of syncing git commit history with data change history, like using git for a repo of data. It's actually quite possible if you use pretty printed JSON as a record format (or other simple linear text formats). I explored more of this "git as DB backend" in some places including: https://github.com/dosyago/sirdb https://github.com/dosyago/sirdb Also, just as a headsup to any folks, the SF version of this "tree map" (Heh) is at: https://web.archive.org/web/20230328192805/https://bsm.sfdpw.org/urbanforestry/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230328192805/https://bsm.sfdpw... (O site and archive seems to be down)
  - simonw 3y ago
    Yeah I have a bunch of these using pretty-printed JSON - here's one that scrapes Hacker News for mentions of my site, for example: https://github.com/simonw/scrape-hacker-news-by-domain/blob/main/simonwillison-net.json https://github.com/simonw/scrape-hacker-news-by-domain/blob/...
    - keepamovin 3y ago
      Wow you're the creator of datasette! Cool, man! I thought that was a really revolutionary idea, and also related to this notion of git backed DB...I'm so glad to sort of see it confirmed with this! Haha :)
  - 3y ago
harel 3y ago
I've checked my local area, and already spotted more mistakes and omissions than correct tree markers. Not saying it as a complaint - there are so many more trees here than specified in the map, I bet the map only shows about 20-30%.
- oliver-rock 3y ago
  It says on the website that it shows 800 000 out of an estimated 8 million, so it shows just 10%
  - harel 3y ago
    I missed that statement then... And my estimate was generous.
bytebot 3y ago
Did not see anyone mention what’s available in Singapore yet: https://www.nparks.gov.sg/treessg https://www.nparks.gov.sg/treessg And you can build on it too: https://exploretrees.sg/ https://exploretrees.sg/
- dkdbejwi383 3y ago
  This is diverging from the topic of trees quite a bit, but as a frequent visitor to SG from northern Europe, I'm always blown away by the people who can manage to do manual labour in jeans there! While I'm sweating in shorts and a light t-shirt just walking from the MRT to my destination.
keepamovin 3y ago
That's beautiful, thank you for that!
pallas_athena 3y ago
Berlin: https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/esri-de-content::baumkataster-berlin/explore https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/esri-de-content::baumkataste... https://www.giessdenkiez.de/ https://www.giessdenkiez.de/
CalRobert 3y ago
For those interested, the EU has nice maps of tree cover density at https://land.copernicus.eu/pan-european/high-resolution-layers/forests/tree-cover-density/status-maps/2015 https://land.copernicus.eu/pan-european/high-resolution-laye...
eithed 3y ago
I'm amazed that such datasets exist. Don't know what's the purpose and who is managing this but it's jus absurd (in a good way)
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  I think, at least partially, "civil engineers" - good to know where trees are as an indication of potential root problems with pavements, pipes, conduits, etc. Also for things like "where might we have road overhang problems" - if it's a conifer, probably ok, but if it's a London Plane, that might be an issue. Oh and also to know where to send the horrifically noisy leaf blowing man who spends half his life outside in the square revving his diesel abomination.
- traceroute66 3y ago
  > I'm amazed that such datasets exist. Don't know what's the purpose and who is managing this but it's jus absurd (in a good way) A significant portion of London's trees are subject to Tree Preservation Orders (TPO) and/or are located in a conservation area.[1] If you want to do anything to a tree subject to the above, then you in conjunction with your tree surgeon need to request permission from the local authority. If you don't then you're in trouble because it is a criminal offence to remove, prune or damage protected trees. In addition you of course have non-protected trees on public land that are owned by the local authority and so they likely have a maintenance database for those. So it therefore goes that you require a database of said trees and hence this dataset is likely nothing more than an aggregation of the indvidual datasets from the various local authorities (of which there are 32 IIRC, hence quite a lot of data). Here is an example of a TPO list from just one Local Authority.[2] [1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tree-preservation-orders-and-trees-in-conservation-areas https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tree-preservation-orders-and-tre... [2] https://www.merton.gov.uk/planning-and-buildings/planning/tree-preservation-orders/list https://www.merton.gov.uk/planning-and-buildings/planning/tr...
tsungi 3y ago
I have also tried to visualize all trees and to find missing trees in Munich city from publicly available aerial images. https://github.com/easz/urban-tree https://github.com/easz/urban-tree
omh 3y ago
As a slightly more frivolous use of this website - we're approaching conker season! Last year my kids wanted to go collecting conkers and I used a similar website (https://www.treetalk.co.uk/ https://www.treetalk.co.uk/) to find a local place with lots of horse chestnuts. It worked brilliantly and the kids thought I was some kind of genius for finding so many.
bloak 3y ago
There seem to be a lot of trees in the category "other". Is there more detailed data for species and variety in another database somewhere, or is there a need for a massive wiki-style tree-spotting data-gathering exercise? Could start now while they still have leaves on them and perhaps also fruit ... A propos that, if you ask it to show just "Black Locust" and "Horse Chestnut", then nothing is shown. But those are common trees! And they are also the two whose names consist of two words. So I suspect a BUG!

139 points by buro9 3y ago

Hey, I can shout-out my place of residence: Melbourne has one of these :-) http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au/ http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au/

zabzonk 3y ago

one thing most people don't realise is how much park and woodland london has.

zzbn00 3y ago
Yes, although on this map I think the trees in parks are not shown
- gcoleman 3y ago
  It's based on data from councils and tfl, so council run parks are included (e.g. Gunnersbury near where I live) but not royal parks (like Richmond park)
  - jwestbury 3y ago
    Seems there are at least a few trees missing in some of the council parks near me, but most of them are there. Quite nice.
quickthrower2 3y ago
And then there is the green belt around London. This sort of thing probably encourages building up not out which is probably a good thing.

hnbear 3y ago

London has a surprising history and love for its trees, more so than I've seen in other cities I've lived in. This means you can find a lot of fun listicles that provide history and fun facts for trees located around the city. For example, [Great Trees of London](https://londonist.com/london/maps/great-trees-of-london-map https://londonist.com/london/maps/great-trees-of-london-map) has a collection I'd actually enjoy walking around, and coupling with other sites in the area. Especially in the heat the difference trees make is incredible. Moving from a tree-lined street to an open one is horrible when walking around the place.

sw104 3y ago
Not to one-up you, but Sheffield in South Yorkshire has even more trees. I visited recently and was taken aback by how much coverage there was for a city center, coming from Leeds, which seems to hate trees. If I remember correctly, London has around 8.5 million trees (for a population of almost 9 million, 1:1 tree:person) and Sheffield has around 4.5 million (for a much smaller population of less than 600,000, 7.5:1 tree:person). Sheffield has more trees per person than any other city in Europe. Sheffield council tried to cut down thousands of trees a few years ago and it caused massive backlash, protests and arrests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_tree_felling_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_tree_felling_protest...
- switch007 3y ago
  I can’t believe how long that saga went on! Sheffield residents are rightly extremely proud of their city. The trees are absolutely wonderful and their numbers make Sheffield quite special. Good on the protestors!
- have_faith 3y ago
  I just came across this: https://sheffieldtreemap.com/ https://sheffieldtreemap.com/ More japanese cherry trees that I realised

conbandit 3y ago

New York City Trees https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/ https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/

geospatialover 3y ago
Here's a cooler (imo) visualization: https://willymaps.github.io/nyctrees/ https://willymaps.github.io/nyctrees/

burkaman 3y ago

This is an unusually nice website, but if you like this, check your own city, they might have one too! For example, here's: DC: https://trees.dc.gov/apps/3677bceead544db79a412e3ab0a68588/explore https://trees.dc.gov/apps/3677bceead544db79a412e3ab0a68588/e... Boston: https://boston.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=c9de58cb207f448a8212163812d91626 https://boston.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?... LA: https://losangelesca.treekeepersoftware.com/index.cfm https://losangelesca.treekeepersoftware.com/index.cfm

gregsadetsky 3y ago
Montreal: https://quebio.ca/en/arbresmtl https://quebio.ca/en/arbresmtl Quebec City: https://quebio.ca/fr/arbresqc https://quebio.ca/fr/arbresqc New York City: https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/ https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/ Paris: https://a3x.carto.com/viz/030b38b6-085f-11e5-8ac5-0e43f3deba5a/public_map https://a3x.carto.com/viz/030b38b6-085f-11e5-8ac5-0e43f3deba... London: https://apps.london.gov.uk/street-trees/ https://apps.london.gov.uk/street-trees/
Retric 3y ago
Interesting these maps are missing many trees such as the DC missing those around the the capital building. Presumably because different organizations are in charge of them.
- nathancahill 3y ago
  When it's the building, the correct spelling is capitol.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Interesting, I’ve seen both used so often I just assumed either worked.
- burkaman 3y ago
  Yes there is a different map for DC parks: https://caseytrees.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html https://caseytrees.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.h..., but it also doesn't have the ones right around the Capitol. I would guess that's because it is federal and not handled by the city? The White House is also not covered, but the Ellipse and the Mall right below it is.

londons_explore 3y ago

I bet this this website cost London £100k or more. They probably contracted it out to some supplier to build and maintain, and they are charging through the nose for hosting it, because the people on the London horticultural team don't do HTML. While I applaud the effort, I do wonder if it is tax money well spent. Perhaps a spreadsheet on a shared drive would have been better value for money?

foota 3y ago
Tbh I feel like that's probably an underestimate, but otoh that's probably a fraction of the cost of maintaining the trees themselves, so I'm not sure it's worth fretting over.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  And the whole point of having a government of London is because it's a huge city. If it was just a large car park it wouldn't need a government. The city is for people, and people both like trees and benefit from many properties of these trees such as their ability to absorb rainfall and provide shade as well as positive contribution to air quality (well, unless you're allergic to tree pollen) so it makes sense for the city government to look after them. This is therefore a reasonable expenditure of some government resources. Just as when they paid "Royal de Luxe" to perform The Sultan's Elephant over several days. The Sultan's Elephant is street theatre, an enormous mechanical elephant, a giant little girl, and some other apparatus turns up, the puppeteers from Royal de Luxe operate these puppets to tell a story for the entertainment of just... everybody who happens to be there, it's on public streets, it's not ticketed, it's not in some arena or screened off area, it's just in your city where you live and/or work. Perhaps you came specifically to this part of the city to see the giant little girl, asleep so peacefully, or perhaps you were surprised to find your journey interrupted by an enormous elephant walking down the street when you went to buy lunch, it doesn't matter, this sort of street art is a reasonable investment.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    I don't think any comment is being made on the utility or not of the trees. I think the comment is specifically about the custom built website to track and map the trees.

JimDabell 3y ago

See also: OpenTrees.org: 13,910,944 open data trees from 192 sources in 19 countries. https://opentrees.org https://opentrees.org https://github.com/stevage/opentrees https://github.com/stevage/opentrees

larodi 3y ago
A friend of mine is doing something similar to this London tree but another European capital. I really don't understand why would someone _not_ integrate or just expand opentrees.org. what is the point of having two openlayers websites? (unless of course the second is esri world atlas...)
spandextwins 3y ago
That is a really nice website! Wow!

Honest_Carrot 3y ago

Sacramento, CA: https://data.cityofsacramento.org/datasets/b9b716e09b5048179ab648bb4518452b https://data.cityofsacramento.org/datasets/b9b716e09b5048179...

jszymborski 3y ago

Huh, looks like Montreal has one of these as well... never would have known. https://quebio.ca/en/arbresmtl https://quebio.ca/en/arbresmtl EDIT: Wondering about the distinct areas without trees on the island? Those are buroughs that look as though they don't report to the City of Montreal. In the case of Westmount, it's because they are a distinct city.

physhster 3y ago

Funny how London cares about its trees while Paris does not.

bullen 3y ago
https://opendata.paris.fr/explore/dataset/les-arbres/map/ https://opendata.paris.fr/explore/dataset/les-arbres/map/

zabzonk 3y ago

i should point out that not all of the uk cares as much for its trees: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/06/sheffield-city-council-behaved-dishonestly-in-street-trees-row-inquiry-finds https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/06/sheffield-ci...

have_faith 3y ago
This is specifically the council. Local resident care an awful lot about their trees and there are many local campaigns to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again. I think the local labour party ended up replacing some of the MP’s involved. (I live in Sheffield)
sw104 3y ago
A select minority in the local council didn't care, but the citizens and those who protested (and got arrested) over this overwhelmingly did. Since the protests, the council stopped cutting the trees down and reversed course. Sheffield has more trees per person than any other city in Europe. Around 4.5 million trees for a population of 600,000 (7.5:1).

Angostura 3y ago

Worth noting that these are only the trees that line roads - so quite a few of those dark areas are actually parks and woods crammed with trees.

BerislavLopac 3y ago
Well, London _is_ technically a forest, after all... https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/did-you-know-that-london-is-the-worlds-largest-urban-forest https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/did-you-know-tha...
astro- 3y ago
Trees on private property are also missing — in front of people's houses/communal areas in front of blocks of flats. There's quite a few of those around me that I would consider to be "street trees". Pretty cool site, though!
badcppdev 3y ago
You're absolutely right. I think this is of trees that need checking and maintenance to keep roads, cars, pedestrians safe. Hence the URL /street_trees/ Parks and woods would be maintained in a different process. Obviously it's acceptable and even desirable to have fallen down trees in woods and some parks.

simonw 3y ago

I've been Git scraping the San Francisco version of this for a few years now. My https://github.com/simonw/sf-tree-history https://github.com/simonw/sf-tree-history repo now has 444 commits (most recent one was just 4 days ago) tracking every change that's been made to https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Street-Tree-List/tkzw-k3nq https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Street-Tree-List/... since March 2019. I haven't yet done anything with this data, but there is so much potential for visualizations and other fun stuff with it. If anyone wants to have a go please be my guest! Wrote more about this project here: https://simonwillison.net/2019/Mar/13/tree-history/ https://simonwillison.net/2019/Mar/13/tree-history/

keepamovin 3y ago
I love the idea of syncing git commit history with data change history, like using git for a repo of data. It's actually quite possible if you use pretty printed JSON as a record format (or other simple linear text formats). I explored more of this "git as DB backend" in some places including: https://github.com/dosyago/sirdb https://github.com/dosyago/sirdb Also, just as a headsup to any folks, the SF version of this "tree map" (Heh) is at: https://web.archive.org/web/20230328192805/https://bsm.sfdpw.org/urbanforestry/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230328192805/https://bsm.sfdpw... (O site and archive seems to be down)
- simonw 3y ago
  Yeah I have a bunch of these using pretty-printed JSON - here's one that scrapes Hacker News for mentions of my site, for example: https://github.com/simonw/scrape-hacker-news-by-domain/blob/main/simonwillison-net.json https://github.com/simonw/scrape-hacker-news-by-domain/blob/...
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    Wow you're the creator of datasette! Cool, man! I thought that was a really revolutionary idea, and also related to this notion of git backed DB...I'm so glad to sort of see it confirmed with this! Haha :)
- 3y ago

harel 3y ago

I've checked my local area, and already spotted more mistakes and omissions than correct tree markers. Not saying it as a complaint - there are so many more trees here than specified in the map, I bet the map only shows about 20-30%.

oliver-rock 3y ago
It says on the website that it shows 800 000 out of an estimated 8 million, so it shows just 10%
- harel 3y ago
  I missed that statement then... And my estimate was generous.

bytebot 3y ago

Did not see anyone mention what’s available in Singapore yet: https://www.nparks.gov.sg/treessg https://www.nparks.gov.sg/treessg And you can build on it too: https://exploretrees.sg/ https://exploretrees.sg/

dkdbejwi383 3y ago
This is diverging from the topic of trees quite a bit, but as a frequent visitor to SG from northern Europe, I'm always blown away by the people who can manage to do manual labour in jeans there! While I'm sweating in shorts and a light t-shirt just walking from the MRT to my destination.

keepamovin 3y ago

That's beautiful, thank you for that!

pallas_athena 3y ago

Berlin: https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/esri-de-content::baumkataster-berlin/explore https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/esri-de-content::baumkataste... https://www.giessdenkiez.de/ https://www.giessdenkiez.de/

CalRobert 3y ago

For those interested, the EU has nice maps of tree cover density at https://land.copernicus.eu/pan-european/high-resolution-layers/forests/tree-cover-density/status-maps/2015 https://land.copernicus.eu/pan-european/high-resolution-laye...

eithed 3y ago

I'm amazed that such datasets exist. Don't know what's the purpose and who is managing this but it's jus absurd (in a good way)

zimpenfish 3y ago
I think, at least partially, "civil engineers" - good to know where trees are as an indication of potential root problems with pavements, pipes, conduits, etc. Also for things like "where might we have road overhang problems" - if it's a conifer, probably ok, but if it's a London Plane, that might be an issue. Oh and also to know where to send the horrifically noisy leaf blowing man who spends half his life outside in the square revving his diesel abomination.
traceroute66 3y ago
> I'm amazed that such datasets exist. Don't know what's the purpose and who is managing this but it's jus absurd (in a good way) A significant portion of London's trees are subject to Tree Preservation Orders (TPO) and/or are located in a conservation area.[1] If you want to do anything to a tree subject to the above, then you in conjunction with your tree surgeon need to request permission from the local authority. If you don't then you're in trouble because it is a criminal offence to remove, prune or damage protected trees. In addition you of course have non-protected trees on public land that are owned by the local authority and so they likely have a maintenance database for those. So it therefore goes that you require a database of said trees and hence this dataset is likely nothing more than an aggregation of the indvidual datasets from the various local authorities (of which there are 32 IIRC, hence quite a lot of data). Here is an example of a TPO list from just one Local Authority.[2] [1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tree-preservation-orders-and-trees-in-conservation-areas https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tree-preservation-orders-and-tre... [2] https://www.merton.gov.uk/planning-and-buildings/planning/tree-preservation-orders/list https://www.merton.gov.uk/planning-and-buildings/planning/tr...

tsungi 3y ago

I have also tried to visualize all trees and to find missing trees in Munich city from publicly available aerial images. https://github.com/easz/urban-tree https://github.com/easz/urban-tree

omh 3y ago

As a slightly more frivolous use of this website - we're approaching conker season! Last year my kids wanted to go collecting conkers and I used a similar website (https://www.treetalk.co.uk/ https://www.treetalk.co.uk/) to find a local place with lots of horse chestnuts. It worked brilliantly and the kids thought I was some kind of genius for finding so many.

bloak 3y ago

There seem to be a lot of trees in the category "other". Is there more detailed data for species and variety in another database somewhere, or is there a need for a massive wiki-style tree-spotting data-gathering exercise? Could start now while they still have leaves on them and perhaps also fruit ... A propos that, if you ask it to show just "Black Locust" and "Horse Chestnut", then nothing is shown. But those are common trees! And they are also the two whose names consist of two words. So I suspect a BUG!