A Map of the Trees of London | Hacker News Reader

A Map of the Trees of London

ianvisits.co.uk

134 pointsedward88 comments

I look to cities like London with awe and respect - that they have managed to keep so much old trees around. I get so frustrated at the local city and country level.

It takes minutes to fell down a tree that took centuries to grow. That there are any old trees around is a sign of persistently maintained high values.

Check out the Noel Park Friendship Tree [1]. Seems like the road has been built around it since at least 1894 [2] (though maybe another tree was there before).

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5969952,-0.1033777,3a,15y,...

[2] https://www.haringey.gov.uk/sites/haringeygovuk/files/append...

One of the things that still chills is me is how Palo Alto city council decided to fell an entire street of old trees to make it look tidy: http://www.paulgraham.com/californiaavenueoaks.html

That said if you ever fly over the UK you'll notice it's a beautiful quilted patchwork of green fields and hedgerows. The UK used to be covered in old woodland forests. Much of it was felled over the centuries, with most of it being cut down during the medieval period.

Not a lot of ancient woodland is left here nor indeed in the US. That said California still has quite a bit. Muir Woods are on my bucket list of places to visit.

A full list of old forests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-growth_forests

Sad. These investigations never go anywhere.

In my city they have relentlessly pursued some people who graffiti painted some trains decades ago with massive retribution lawsuits.

Yet any city official or workman can fell any number of trees with no permission whatsoever and the whole chain of command just shrugs.

A paint factory (accidentally) poured a huge amount of poison to a river. All the fish died. Nothing again really happened, all the law cases were dismissed. (The company did voluntarily repent and support later conservation efforts.)

Decades later and that street still looks bleak.

Well, at least they replaced the trees instead of just removing them.

It's actually an open scientific question how much of Europe was covered by forest vs meadows. One of the main things that argues for rather more meadows is that we have trees that grow quite poorly / not at all in forests but very well by themselves.

Ironic given that the city was named after a tree.

They realized a bit late. Europe razed her forests. Maybe they can track their trees because they only have so many. To compare: CA is about twice as big as the UK and Californians own more forests as individuals than the UK has in total. Four times as much area in California is forest as in the UK in total.

They owe the rest of the Earth a terrible debt.

Before we go too far with the UK bashing. It’s worth noting that the UK’s population is ~66 million. California is ~44 million.

California population density is ~251 people/sq mile. UK population density is ~727 people/sq mile. So the UK has almost 3x the population density, the UK simply doesn’t have oodles of unused space like the US. So a significantly reduced number of trees and forests isn’t much of a surprise.

Indeed, but more people isn't good for its own sake. Lest we forget, California produces almost as much in its economy as the UK does with 2/3rds the people. We are more forested, we are more people-efficient, we are just as power-efficient, our energy comes form just as good sources. They need to step up. Our conditions here will not last forever and it is time for them to reforest, and pay the debt they owe the Earth.

If feel like you’re arrogantly ignoring the fact that California is part of the much larger US economy, and all the benefits that entails.

And that despite the so called “good power sources” California still emits almost double the Co2 per capita than the UK (CA ~10 ton / capita; ~6 ton / capita; for 2017).

You’re also forgetting that most of the UKs deforestation periods occurred during World Wars I & II, so the US also benefited significantly from this deforestation.

The UK has also done a significant amount of _re_forestation. Increasing forest coverage from a low of 9% to 38% today[1].

So before you march around telling people to “step up” perhaps consider doing a little research, and examine your own impacts on the world. Don’t just belittle others.

[1]: https://www.ies-uk.org.uk/deforestation.php

I'm carbon negative. I'm probably at the 0.01% in this world. Europe has led the world down a dark path and she needs to heal the wounds she has given Mother Earth.

Per-capita isn't as useful a measure as carbon intensity (/km^2) or carbon efficiency (/dollar). At this point, if the UK stopped doing its slow-motion destruction of the planet and started creating more with less, it can still redeem itself for the harm it's done all of humanity present and future.

> I'm carbon negative. I'm probably at the 0.01% in this world.

I’m sure the UK has plenty of carbon negative people too, so you being carbon negative is nothing to write home about, and quite frankly irrelevant to your argument.

> Europe has led the world down a dark path

Right so Europe has been the worlds primary superpower for the last 50 years, not the US. And the US hasn’t been an independent nation for almost 300 years. I clearly missed that memo.

> Per-capita isn't as useful a measure as carbon intensity (/km^2) or carbon efficiency (/dollar).

I also don’t see the relevance of either carbon intensity or carbon efficiency. Carbon intensity just shows that CA is a large land mass, and carbon efficiency, well the UK is more “carbon efficient” at 139kg/$ compared to CA’s 154kg/$, so the UK is 10% more efficient (2017 figures, GDP/Co2).

> At this point, if the UK stopped doing its slow-motion destruction of the planet and started creating more with less, it can still redeem itself for the harm it's done all of humanity present and future.

Looking at the stats, it appears it’s CA that has some catching up todo. Not the UK.

That's the trick. Present value is only so much of the picture. If I dump hecka carbon in for 350 years and then suddenly go clean for one year, I still have to account for my 350 years. The UK has a lot of sins she has to clean up after. No lectures from her till she cleans up her mess.

"Yeah, I didn't kill anyone today." doesn't get you off the murder charge.

I don’t think anyone is claiming the UK hasn’t got its fair share of cleaning up todo.

But that doesn’t change the fact that CA and the US is equally, if not more, guilty. It’s not like the US opted out of the industrial revolution, or the subsequent oil based economy.

The vast majority (~70%) of total human Co2 emissions happened after 1960. Since the 1960 the US has been the largest Co2 emitter until ~2000 when China became the largest emitter.

But the US has been consistently, and continues to be, the largest emitter per capita, generally emitting twice the amount per capita of the UK.

So in short, the UK may have committed sins. But the US has worked hard and managed to commit even greater sins on almost every environmental metric. I’m sorry, when it comes to environmental damage the UK and EU just can’t compete with what the US has inflicted and continues to inflict.

In CO2 tons / sanctimony unit they certainly are the leaders. I'll gladly amend my position to condemn the US too, but the UK and the EU are on no high horse. Merely pumping out masses of people is no defence for blotting the Earth with their slime.

I think you need to take a chill pill, and maybe reconsider some of those racist views you seem to be cultivating there. They’re make you look like a rather ugly individual.

It's pretty typical of apologists to pull this tone policing. Here's a comic that describes it: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DCXYRT4UwAAgdMy.jpg

Well you're right, we just need to get rid of half the people then we can start working on that. What do you suggest we do with them?

You can't kill people. I simply propose that we move costs back on to consumers. So, like I do, make everyone pay for the carbon they produce. Stagger it so that they overpay by some amount and let the countries that haven't yet polluted underpay. It'll be a small factor, some 10x or so.

For my life that'll be around $4k extra in costs per year. If someone already lives a very carbon neutral lifestyle then it'll be much less. If they fly a lot more it'll be a lot more.

England used to be like 95% under the plow to feed itself in the middle ages. As agricultural techniques improved, it became possible to have land set aside for forests while feeding the population. This land use rate isn't an English problem, it is an entire agrarian world problem. Blame the farming cultures that slaughtered the pastoralists 10,000 years ago if you want to finger point.

It's kind of cherry picking that you singled out CA and ignore the wastes of forests felled from the Atlantic to the rockies. We haven't done much better. It wasn't even a century ago that we had dust bowls sweeping across the great plains from so much overfarming. 100 years ago the total population of CA was 1/6 of greater London, you can't compare the UK to CA much better than an apple to an orange.

And now that agricultural techniques are better. It's time for the UK to give back to the Earth. Their endless whinging about the developing world logging their forests stands as hollow if they will not undo the untold amounts of harm they have done the Earth.

I picked California because I live here and because we're good at this - for all of our faults.

> I picked California because I live here and because we're good at this

Source please

My lease document? Probably not going to share a source for how I live here.

I think it was asking about 'because we're good at this', not whether or not you live in CA

Do we live in the same state? CA builds sprawling suburbs over historical burn areas, then wonders why homes burn every single summer, multiple times. We still have oil derricks adjacent to housing. All the shit in LA is dumped to sea. Better than most states, but a long way to go.

Unfortunately I've noticed that a lot of development in the UK now starts with razing the area to the ground rather than working with the existing plant life. Even when trees are considered the results are often not good. Milton Keynes had a famous oak tree that became a centre piece of a shopping centre. The tree soon became diseased and eventually died.

One of my favourite datasets to play with is the city of San Francisco's tree database. 190,000 records each with lat/lon, species, plant date, caretaking organization and more.

Out of curiosity I set up a script to grab a new copy every day and diff it - turns out they post an update to it nearly every working day! https://simonwillison.net/2019/Mar/13/tree-history/

This is really great, especially the change tracking. I've been doing something similar with some public city real estate data. Maybe I'll set it up in a similar way. Thanks for posting this!

Here is a map that covers a neighbourhood in Toronto, collected by the residents, https://theara.org/Interactive-Tree-Map

The city of Toronto has 500,000 trees mapped, and the data open https://open.toronto.ca/dataset/street-tree-data/

Melbourne has the same thing, except they gave each tree an email address so the public could send alerts about the trees condition. But instead they sent love letters and messages to each tree. Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-12/people-are-emailing-t...

How is that working out?

One challenge it seems ever locale is dealing with is a large faction of people who cannot see the forest for the trees, so to speak. It seems everywhere I've lived, there are large factions of folks who cite individual trees in their neighborhoods as fodder to shoot down environmental projects.

I've seen light rail, bus lines, and other public transit; bike and pedestrian facilities like sidewalks; dense sustainable housing on transit corridors; PV and passive solar energy projects; contaminant removal and other soil/water quality mitigation efforts; and a slew of other projects backed by environmental organizations and non-profits get shut down because of neighbors defending individual trees. It's gotten to the point where I've become very cynical towards efforts to "save the trees" because so often it means "save the trees in my direct viewshed, even if it means cutting down hundreds of trees outside of town to build sprawling subdivisions there instead."

Are there places that are getting this balance to be healthier? Fostering a love for an urban canopy while also a general recognition that some trees coming down is necessary to repair ecologically poor planning decisions of the past 70 years or so?

Here is a project to aggregate all the various open city and regional tree datasets: https://opentrees.org

Maybe interesting to the HN crowd: https://www.20tree.ai/. Startup doing ML on satellite images to recognize trees, crop health and a bunch of other stuff.

Neat, will have to read what they're doing. I've heard of this simple approach before - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalized_difference_vegetati... using the ratio of IR / red light.

It sounds like they have very high resolution imagery though "up to 0.3m resolution", which sounds cool.

Do you happen to know if there's anything similar for trying to extract similar stuff (i.e. forests-related information) from older paper-maps which have by now been digitised?

For example the old (old as in from the 1950s-1960s) Soviet maps for my country (Romania) are quite accurate, you can quite clearly see the extent of forests back then, and I think it'd be helpful if one could extract that information in an "automated" way.

For those curious the maps can be accessed here [1] by selecting the "Harti sovietice 50k" layer and by de-selecting the default layer, called "Planurile directoare" (there's a menu button on the top-left corner of the screen).

[1] http://www.geo-spatial.org/harti/#/viewer/openlayers/10

I'm not sure the technologies are quite compatible, since the site you linked to has actual maps rather than satellite imagery. That said, it seems like something ML/computer vision should be able to do, although I'm not good enough at either ML or GIS tools to do it myself.

There's also this which might be based on the same data:

https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/environment/parks-green...

Looks like they use that as a data source, https://www.treetalk.co.uk/about amongst others.

Logistically speaking, I wonder what's the best way to create a tree map/database for my own town? Google maps will go a long way towards getting location. Is the rest just driving/walking around collecting data (species etc..) manually?

Start entering the data in Open Street Map. https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/43.68930/-79.44241

The docs for entering trees on OpenStreetMap:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tree

London has its own tree, the London plane. It's a hybrid of the American sycamore and the Oriental plane that supposedly grew when they were planted next to each other in Vauxhall Gardens in the 17th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus_%C3%97_acerifolia

These are all over Pittsburgh!

https://www.birdsoutsidemywindow.org/2019/03/28/the-trees-ar...

> planted in Pittsburgh in the late 1800s because they’re tolerant of air pollution

They are all over everywhere! They're one of the most popular street trees in many cities around the world. Incredibly robust, hardly susceptible to any insects, etc etc.

There's a fair amount of trees listed on the map for my local area, but the main tree, that's locally famous[1] isn't listed, as it's technically on private property.

[1] https://bigginhill.co.uk/cedar.htm

The Amsterdam city maintains maps of many things, including its trees: https://maps.amsterdam.nl/bomen/?LANG=en

For NYC: https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/tree-map

The City of Vienna has the Baumkataster [1] a database of all trees that are taken care of by the municipal gardening service (Wiener Stadtgärten). It even tells you when a tree was planted.

[1] https://www.wien.gv.at/umweltgut/public/grafik.aspx?ThemePag...

Turns out "when a tree was planted" is kind of a fuzzy concept. Do we mean, when the seed first germinated? Or when the sapling was first installed on the site?

Neat fact: the UN definition of a forest is 20% coverage. London is 21% trees. London is a forest.

https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/did-you-know-tha...

I've seen several of these maps (they are available for most large German cities) and i always ask myself what the value proposition and applications for such maps are. It seems like they take large resources (e.g. manual collection of the data) to create.

AFAIK in London the data are extracted from the archives of the local councils that planted the trees in the first place and were responsible for maintenance afterwards. I can imagine a best-case scenario is that they already have maps of the borough where they mark all the trees, and it's a matter of digitializing those maps and combining them.

It still takes time to combine all these data, presumably, but there were some useful studies on the ecologicical effects of different types of trees that came out of these data.

I would think cities already have the data, as they have to do safety inspections on their trees, take them into account when doing street renovations, report on the ‘greenness’ of the city, etc.

Opening up the data isn’t that costly, and fits “Open Data” policies. Apps around this often are third party.

Since leafy surroundings and tree presence is one of the selling points for good properties, it would be great to align incentives of real estate agencies and such data collection efforts

> "i always ask myself what the value proposition and applications for such maps are. It seems like they take large resources (e.g. manual collection of the data) to create"

There was a survey a few years back to assess the economic value of the trees in London, for pollution removal, stormwater alleviation, etc. which put the total annual benefits at £132.7M[0].

[0] https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/valuing_london...

The map is generally a pretty cheap by-product of two much more expensive processes: planting trees, and maintaining trees. To do any kind of long term strategic management of the assets (trees) generally requires knowing what you have, which means a tree survey. That's kind of expensive (say $1 per tree), but cheap compared to the cost of planting a tree and maintaining it.

Once you have all that data, to stick it on a public website is easy. Or even better, post it to your open data site, and let opentrees.org use it.

Check out the Noel Park Friendship Tree [1]. Seems like the road has been built around it since at least 1894 [2] (though maybe another tree was there before).

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5969952,-0.1033777,3a,15y,...

[2] https://www.haringey.gov.uk/sites/haringeygovuk/files/append...

Most interesting but alas, missing a whole bunch of trees around where I am. Says "66 trees of 13 species" but I can see at least 20 trees it's missing. Someone needs to prod the councils to update their records, I think.

If I zoom out I get "73 species in view" and if I zoom in I get "313 species in view"

Anyway, it would be nice if there was a filter so you could select all trees of a given type. Or view all the public trees versus privately owned trees.

You can filter by tree type on the official map (which I think shows the same data): https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/environment/parks-green...

Ok, but this only shows about 20 species.

I'm surprised by the stark difference in density between some of the boroughs. E.g. Dalston has very few trees compared with Islington.

Is that because of actual difference in density or difference in tracking between various councils?

My guess is the latter. There are several woods and parks around where I live in Harringey that are showing no trees on the map

Hello fellow Harringey/Haringay-ite!

I was surprised the other day on a long-ish walk that skirted around the base of Ally Pally, just how green the built up areas of Harringey are. I often get the impression that Haringey (and Hackney) are making every effort to pull down old-growth trees to make way for new developments, but this view of the borough 'side on' allayed my fears.

Still, I'm always sad to see old trees chopped down (as is happening now in Woodberry Down and happened a few years back around Hornsey, all in the quest to pack more people in).

Yes I hate it when they pull down old-ish trees on the street, though to be fair they have conscientiously replanted lots near us.

As for the maps it seems to vary quite sharply from area to area, presumably just because bits haven't been filled in yet. They've got a lovely old oak at the end of our road on there, and long may it last...

Yep - Hampstead heath is apparently a tree-less dustbowl according to this map, despite it actually being heavily wooded.

What's also cool is we have two posts about this and both are trending!

I live in South Hampstead about 3-4 miles from dead centre of London. We are very fortunate to have a garden. It is surrounded by many other gardens. Our building was constructed in the 1880s. There are many very old beautiful trees in the adjoining gardens, our garden has a forest feel at times. I'm filled with gratitude to some late Victorians who, 140 years ago, planted some small sapplings in their new back garden and probably didn't see them grow to anything very impressive.

For a map of the trees of Adelaide, Agen, Ajax, Alblasserdam, Allentown, Amersfoot, Amherst, Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Anaheim, Antwerp, Arganda del Rey, Arnhem, Assen, Auburn, Aurora, Austin, Bakersfield, Ballarat, Barcelona, Barendrecht, Barrie, Basel, Bayonne, Belfast, Bendigo, Berkeley, Berlin, Birmingham, Bologna, Bonn, Bordeaux, Boroondara, Boulder, Bozeman, Bretagne, Brimbank, Bristol, Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Buffalo, Burnside, Calgary, Cambridge, Cape Coral, Cary, Champaign, Charlottesville, Chemnitz, Chestermere, Chile (OSM), Colac-Otways, Colombus, Colorado Springs, Copenhagen, Corangamite, Cornell University, Craig-y-Nos, Cupertino, Cáceres, Delft, Den Haag, Denver, Divonne-les-Bains, Dordrecht, Dundee, Durango, Edinburgh, Edmonton, Eindhoven, Escondido, Fingal, Frankfurt, Geelong, Gelsenkirchen, Gent, Glen Eira, Glenelg, Grand Paris Seine Ouest, Grand Paris Sud, Grenoble, Groningen, Guingamp, Haarlem, Halle, Hamburg, Hamburg Hafen, Hilversum, Hobart, Hobson's Bay, Hudson River Park, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Jena, Kamloops, Karlsruhe, Kelowna, Kitchener, Köln, Las Vegas, Launceston, Leipzig, Lelystad, Lethbridge, Linz, Lisbon, London, Longueuil, Luxembourg, Lyon, Madison, Madrid, Manlleu, Manningham, Maple Ridge, Marysville, Melbourne, Metz, Missisauga, Moncton, Monterrey, Montpellier, Montreal, Mountain View, Mulhouse, Naperville, Nevers, New West, New West, New York, Nice, Nichols Arboretum, Nijmegen, North Vancouver, Oakville, Orléans, Oslo, Ottawa, Oxnard, Pacific Grove, Palmerston North, Paris, Perth, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Placentia, Port Phillip, Portland, Portland, Oregon, Prince George, Prospect, Prospect, Providence, Quebec City, Regina, Rennes, Rennes, Repentigny, Richardson, Rochester, Roosendaal, Rostock, Saint Quentinois, Saint-Egrève, San Francisco, San Jose, San Jose, San Jose, Santiago de Compostela, Sarasota, Seattle, Seine-Saint-Denis, Sevilla, Shepparton, Sherwood Arboretum, Sioux Falls, Sliedrecht, Southern Grampians, Springfield, St Augustine, St Catharines, Strathcona, Surrey, Sydney, Three Rivers, Tilburg, Toronto, Torrent, Toulouse, Troisdorf, Trädportalen, UNT, Ulm, Umea, Unley, Utrecht, Valencia, Vancouver, Versailles, Victoria, Victoriaville, Vienna, Villa_Manin, Waite Arboretum, Wake Forest, Wallonie-Bruxelles, Washington, Washington DC, Waterloo, Welland, Wesel, West Chester, Westerville, Weston, White Rock, Winnipeg, Wodonga, Wylie, Wyndham, Yarra, York, York, York, Zaanstad, or Zvartewaterland, you can try https://opentrees.org

Looks like there's a tree from Madrid on null island.

Yeah, there are a few hilarious data errors around the place. A couple in various oceans, and a really odd streak of trees escaped from Cologne in the northwest of France near the Channel.

Even around Null Island there are a few other trees that aren't exactly on 0,0 but nearby.

A Jupyter Notebook with the trees of Copenhagen: https://hub.gke.mybinder.org/user/jessalfredsen-notebooks-8k...

Binder needs a link to the root, like so: https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/jessalfredsen/notebooks.git/maste... The link to the started notebook is not persistent :)

I wonder what changes between the detected tree on the north side and the undetected trees just south https://www.treetalk.co.uk/map/#xyz=17.18/51.45268/-0.300569

Open data for Vancouver tree lovers, including map, export, API, etc.:

https://opendata.vancouver.ca/explore/dataset/street-trees/m...

For Singapore, there's https://www.nparks.gov.sg/trees

I've also taken the data and built https://exploretrees.sg/

Glad to see there are no trees in Finsbury Park. At least that might keep the bloody slackliners out now.

(I understand that there are gaps in the data. In this case, i think it's that there is no data for the whole of the borough of Haringey, for whatever reason)

For all of you interested:

A Map of the Trees of Vienna https://www.wien.gv.at/umweltgut/public/grafik.aspx?ThemePag...

A map of the trees in Paris: https://opendata.paris.fr/explore/dataset/les-arbres/map/?lo...

here's a game using this data: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=at.flamingos.w...

Source of data: https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/local-authority-maintaine... - Which is super cool.

This is wonderful, thank you for posting. So many times I have wondered what certain trees in parks near me are.

And now I have been able to locate 3 mulberry trees near me - will be visiting at harvest time this year

Here is a service that aggregates the various public, opendata sets https://opentrees.org

This is an excellent find. Much more fun than Pokemon Go!

This, your Majesty, is the Linden tree.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoqlYGuZGVM

Thought it was going to be this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kZoTcYYio0

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