Interesting Link(s): all the trees in several cities
Cities need arborists; if you got trees on public land along roads, you gotta keep the off the road and off power lines, monitor them for disease, and identify places which simply don't have enough of them. Trees in cities have huge public health impacts - they cool cities, reduce particulate matter in the air, and generally Look Nice and make people happy. So counting them is necessary.
A lot of cities make the tree data for their city totally public. Here are some city tree maps depicting each and every single tree in parks and road areas:
- San Francisco (shared with me by JP Lebreton, which kicked off this blog post) lets you see some basic data about each tree, such as its species and its trunk diameter.
- Los Angeles lets you see the species of every tree, and the total dollar value of the pollution and water runoff mitigation the whole set of trees provide together.
- New York City has a great tool which even lists the species, the arborist work orders recently submitted for each tree, and the supposed dollar value of the "ecological benefits" each tree individually provides
- Edmonton lets you filter by "type of edible fruit," which is incredible
- Seattle maps all street and park trees under the 'Explore Seattle's Trees' tab on this page. You can apply filters to see them color coded by owner and species. There is a layer showing specially distinguished "heritage trees" as well. Other tabs depict permit applications for arborist work, and the estimated severity of tree-cover-related environmental racism and classism occurring in each part of the city.
A lot of cities make this data public, but do not operate an interactive map webapp, which I understand. Philadelphia claims that it had a web map of all its trees back in 2016, but I was only able to find the raw GIS data, not a map. Austin has a giant PNG of the city's tree canopy as of 2022, but it's not high enough resolution to see individual trees. I think the NYC map is obviously the cream of the crop here, but it's not much of a surprise to me that NYC has the money and infrastructure to maintain something like that. (The quality of the map, however, was a huge surprise to me.)
These maps had me thinking about whether it would be possible to make a city management game focused on arborist labor only. Imagine a kind of stripped down city planning game where you are stuck with a certain street and park network, and are dispatching arborist crews to maintain trees, pursuing plans to establish new tree cover threshholds in neighborhoods, and so on. It would be interesting to see a simulator game in this area which plays out over the real decades-to-centuries timeframe of actual tree cover changes... for example, the story of street trees (and sidewalk inaccessibility) in Los Angeles has its roots decades and decades ago, when developers in the 20th century started planting trees which are now ripping the sidewalks to pieces. Even rich neighborhoods in LA are often completely inaccessible - you will see a sidewalk that looks like Mount Everest in front of a home worth millions of dollars, and nobody's fixing it, because the citywide cost of these changes is so enormous and time-consuming that the city has been putting it off for decades. It might be both interesting and extremely fun (Dwarf Fortress style) to play a game which simulates this kind of work. Who knows. (I'm certainly not smart enough to make a game like that.)