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!
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).
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...)
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.
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.
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.
Yes there is a different map for DC parks: 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.
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!
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/) 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.
> 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]
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.
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.
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".
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%.
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)
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)
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?
As anyone who’s been near government data publishing or asset tracking works attest - That’s a sure fire way to either publish stale/wrong information or simply lose trees.
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.
I'm glad this site exists. What doesn't get measured doesn't get managed, so I'm all for.
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
It probably wasn't outsourced. Local authorities have their own GIS and data people because it's essential to a council being able to do most of the jobs it does.
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/
London GDP is about £500 billion. They’ll need this info to maintain the trees in any case. If it cost 100k, it would be 0.02% of GDP. For the difference trees make to urban areas, it would be utterly trivial. If you made £50k cash after tax a year (so closer to 80k before tax), it would be £10 a year, that’s the fraction.
Of course it costs far more than £100k to maintain this data.
I think most Londoners wouldn't want to pay £10/year for a tree database.
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.
One of the benefits of representative democracy & taxes is that individuals don't get asked about spending for each line item. That decision lies on the people chosen (directly or indirectly by the public) to make those decisions based on better experience than the general public has. Problems tend to arise when small numbers of people try to micromanage government spending & actions by enforcing their minority views directly on the actions of government, not via representative elections.
Trees can be a hazard. Roots and branches need to be monitored, for tripping or falling risks, or the risk of the tree falling over. Trees need to be trimmed, especially where they intrude into problem space - cables (very rare in London), double decker buses, people's property, and so on.
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.
Trees can be a hazard. Roots and branches need to be monitored, for tripping or falling risks, or the risk of the tree falling over. Trees need to be trimmed, especially where they intrude into problem space - cables (very rare in London), double decker buses, people's property, and so on.
> I bet this this website cost London £100k or more.
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?
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.
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.
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/