TreeTalk London – Tree Map
treetalk.co.uk
treetalk.co.uk
> Gieß den Kiez is a participatory platform where you can inform yourself about the trees in your neighbourhood and their water needs. You can explore individual trees in Berlin and find out about the proper watering of trees. If you want to water the same trees regularly, you should create an account, adopt the trees and show that they are taken care of. This way, coordination takes place in the neighbourhood.
And while we're at it, the city's official Geoportal Berlin[2] is a treasure trove of open geo data.
[1] https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=05c3f9d7dea6422b86e...
True story: Summer 2022 in London was unprecedented and brutal. After weeks of heat without rain, it got worse: there was a day that the temperature reached 41C in July, and only a bit cooler on days on either side. 3 young trees on that map are possibly only alive because I noticed how badly they were doing (leaves all shrivelling up and falling off), and applied water daily until the heatwave was over and they started to grow new leaves.
I wonder what would have happened if those trees had died? How and when is the map updated? These treed are cared for (in as much as they are cared for at all) by the borough council. So the tree data is also collected by them?
1) https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2022/jul/19/uk-weathe...
A Map of the Trees of London - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23078682 - May 2020 (88 comments)
Edit: Related ongoing thread:
Fruit trees – SmartView Christchurch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34888906 - Feb 2023 (30 comments)
It even tries to show a Google street view picture of the tree, if possible.
The goggles, they do nothing!
Simply beautiful.
I watched the 5th episode of LIDAR heroes from NASA today and they're talking about 1m+ points on the new devices, surely we could actually count how many trees using that data.. yea, might be a bit off, but it'd work in urban areas where mass density canopy calcs or whatever is impossible.
Lonesome trees need love too
Found it: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14261
And no the data is not imported to OSM at this date. But the doc for natural=tree tag in OSM does have quite a lot of possible extra types, leaf_type and cycle are the most common.
But generally, someone must care enough to ask the data holders to make such an import possible. And I guess for individual trees the interest isn't as high as for roads or building footprints.
It is a tricky subject that OSM handles by not importing as much as Google.
> Rare species. This is one of TreeTalk's Bronze trees. There are no more than 200 of them in streets around London.
or maybe something even more trivial -- maybe you just want to add a small extension to the house for your newborn kid or so your grandma can move in, etc. but you can't do it because the fucking tree is in the way and you can't cut it down even though it's on your property. so you either just accept living in a smaller house than you want, or you move out and pay a higher mortgage on the new place. either way is deadweight loss to the economy.
it's yet another layer in the death-by-a-thousand-cuts that is the british planning system, that keeps housing scarce and strangles the economy. it all adds up[1].
this is why I say it is (a small part of) a scam. specifically a supply-restriction cartel, like OPEC. it lets landlords collectively enrich themselves at no risk, by making themselves unable to respond to market price signals telling them to intensify the use of their land, to meet the demand for housing.
this is the sordid root of so much "tory environmentalism" btw; it's a wonderful deniable tool that nimbys use to veto redevelopment.
but people still need places to live. and if you can't build up in the city, you have to build out into the countryside. and that's where the new housing supply (what little of it there is) is predominantly coming from: rubbish suburban new-builds. they have to trample over a lot of nature to do that.
if we really must conserve the number of trees, let landowners cut them down on their own property but contribute money into a council fund for the planting of an equivalent tree on public land. more tree-lined streets, more parks, as a fully public good. trees are much more valuable when they are in a place to provide shade to pedestrians!
when housing is easy to build, you get competition between landlords (instead of competition between renters). rents go down. landlording becomes a risky enterprise once again, not some economic fief for lucky boomer incumbents.
[1] e.g. check this shit out https://conservativehome.com/2021/08/16/samuel-hughes-revivi...
>The most celebrated case of this is Fitzroy Road in Primrose Hill, pictured below, which was formerly an extreme ‘gap-tooth’ terrace with just a single old mansard. The residents campaigned for permission to add more, which the council eventually granted on condition that every house add an identical mansard simultaneously.
The chances are that if there's a large tree in a garden then it was planted when the house was built and covered by a TPO from the council.