London Street Trees
apps.london.gov.uk
apps.london.gov.uk
My 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/... 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/
I explored more of this "git as DB backend" in some places including: 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... (O site and archive seems to be down)
There's a size limit to consider: GitHub won't let you push a file larger than 100MB and prefer you to keep the repo itself below 2GB.
Most of my scraping projects are a tiny fraction of that size though.
For example, [Great Trees of London](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.
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_protest...
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!
More japanese cherry trees that I realised
OpenTrees.org: 13,910,944 open data trees from 192 sources in 19 countries.
what is the point of having two openlayers websites? (unless of course the second is esri world atlas...)
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.
https://www.nparks.gov.sg/treessg
And you can build on it too: https://exploretrees.sg/
DC: https://trees.dc.gov/apps/3677bceead544db79a412e3ab0a68588/e...
Boston: https://boston.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?...
Quebec City: https://quebio.ca/fr/arbresqc
New York City: https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/
Paris: https://a3x.carto.com/viz/030b38b6-085f-11e5-8ac5-0e43f3deba...
(the ability to get info on a specific tree seems to be broken)
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!
Last year my kids wanted to go collecting conkers and I used a similar website (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.
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.
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-tre... [2] https://www.merton.gov.uk/planning-and-buildings/planning/tr...
Pretty cool site, though!
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.
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).
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?
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.
I think the comment is specifically about the custom built website to track and map the trees.
Perhaps spend less time worrying about a made up estimate of tax money spent and more time lobbying internally for Google to pay their fair share of tax?
I’m not in London but surely there is more than 100k in public policy good to be had in promoting trees as assets that are worth stewarding well. Is population scale care for trees with a month of arborist days?
Urban forests make air conditioning work. Consider it an indirect investment in power grid resistance.
They also help surface drainage. Consider it an investment in roads and stormwater.
Regarding drainage, there is so little soil left in London that surface drainage of the kind you seem to be thinking of is non-existent. We had to build the supersewer to deal with it, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tideway_Scheme
Of course it costs far more than £100k to maintain this data.
Imagine a sign saying "Just donate £10 so we can have a database to tell us where our trees are", I bet the vast majority of Londoners wouldn't hand over £10.
Even a keen gardener wouldn't likely pay £10 to have a map of where all the vegetables in their vegetable patch were.
The database needs to be built.
The database needs to be built.
Also as someone else pointed out I got my maths wrong (I blame no calculator on an ipad): it is about 1p from 50k a year. I calculated with 500 million not billion.
We aren't all poverty stricken, I'm quite happy to commit my 1p share to this website.
Keeping track of things is a really necessary function of any council. They have massive asset registers that need to know where everything is, from streetlights, to bins, to bus-stops, not to mention planning. They track anything they are responsible for, because otherwise it's rather hard to be be responsible for it.
That includes street trees, which are the council's responsibility. This is why the London one doesn't include ones in parks, since those are maintained by the Royal Parks people. This is their internal register of trees that someone has slapped a
My local council (Bath and North East Somerset) has a small but excellent data team, and they have an online map with all their data in one place. There are layers for everything, https://www.bathnes.gov.uk/webforms/maps/