
A Map of the Trees of London - edward
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2020/05/05/a-map-of-the-trees-of-london/
======
Gravityloss
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.

~~~
leonroy
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](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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-growth_forests)

~~~
Gravityloss
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.)

------
simonw
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/](https://simonwillison.net/2019/Mar/13/tree-history/)

~~~
dionidium
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!

------
mymythisisthis
Here is a map that covers a neighbourhood in Toronto, collected by the
residents, [https://theara.org/Interactive-Tree-
Map](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/](https://open.toronto.ca/dataset/street-tree-data/)

------
altitudinous
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...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-12/people-are-emailing-
trees/10468964?nw=0)

~~~
catlas3r
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?

------
freyfogle
Here is a project to aggregate all the various open city and regional tree
datasets: [https://opentrees.org](https://opentrees.org)

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

~~~
paganel
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](http://www.geo-
spatial.org/harti/#/viewer/openlayers/10)

~~~
WJW
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.

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

[https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/environment/parks-
green...](https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/environment/parks-green-spaces-
and-biodiversity/trees-and-woodlands/london-tree-map)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Looks like they use that as a data source,
[https://www.treetalk.co.uk/about](https://www.treetalk.co.uk/about) amongst
others.

------
max_likelihood
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?

~~~
mymythisisthis
Start entering the data in Open Street Map.
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/43.68930/-79.44241](https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/43.68930/-79.44241)

------
mprovost
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus_%C3%97_acerifolia)

~~~
tantalor
These are all over Pittsburgh!

[https://www.birdsoutsidemywindow.org/2019/03/28/the-trees-
ar...](https://www.birdsoutsidemywindow.org/2019/03/28/the-trees-are-snowing/)

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

~~~
stevage
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.

------
Jaruzel
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](https://bigginhill.co.uk/cedar.htm)

------
eythian
The Amsterdam city maintains maps of many things, including its trees:
[https://maps.amsterdam.nl/bomen/?LANG=en](https://maps.amsterdam.nl/bomen/?LANG=en)

------
wclax04
For NYC: [https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/tree-map](https://tree-
map.nycgovparks.org/tree-map)

------
9wQJs3wWewQk
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...](https://www.wien.gv.at/umweltgut/public/grafik.aspx?ThemePage=11)

~~~
stevage
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?

------
genmon
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...](https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/did-you-know-that-london-
is-the-worlds-largest-urban-forest)

------
Random_ernest
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.

~~~
xiaq
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.

------
dreen
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,...](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5969952,-0.1033777,3a,15y,198.86h,67.96t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssvHxWpyBFjqefJqFz46P4g!2e0!7i16384!8i8192)

[2]
[https://www.haringey.gov.uk/sites/haringeygovuk/files/append...](https://www.haringey.gov.uk/sites/haringeygovuk/files/appendix_1_noel_park_caamp_finalised_3.compressed_0.pdf)

------
zimpenfish
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.

------
amelius
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.

~~~
mrischard
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...](https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/environment/parks-green-spaces-
and-biodiversity/trees-and-woodlands/london-tree-map)

~~~
amelius
Ok, but this only shows about 20 species.

------
haack
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?

~~~
tomgp
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

~~~
detritus
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).

~~~
jlarcombe
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...

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

------
dia80
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.

------
stevage
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](https://opentrees.org)

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

~~~
stevage
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.

------
jessalfredsen
A Jupyter Notebook with the trees of Copenhagen:
[https://hub.gke.mybinder.org/user/jessalfredsen-
notebooks-8k...](https://hub.gke.mybinder.org/user/jessalfredsen-
notebooks-8k7y2kcv/notebooks/Open%20trees%20in%20Copenhagen.ipynb)

~~~
habi
Binder needs a link to the root, like so:
[https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/jessalfredsen/notebooks.git/maste...](https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/jessalfredsen/notebooks.git/master?filepath=Open%20trees%20in%20Copenhagen.ipynb)
The link to the _started_ notebook is not persistent :)

------
LoSboccacc
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](https://www.treetalk.co.uk/map/#xyz=17.18/51.45268/-0.300569)

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

[https://opendata.vancouver.ca/explore/dataset/street-
trees/m...](https://opendata.vancouver.ca/explore/dataset/street-trees/map/)

------
cheeaun
For Singapore, there's
[https://www.nparks.gov.sg/trees](https://www.nparks.gov.sg/trees)

I've also taken the data and built
[https://exploretrees.sg/](https://exploretrees.sg/)

------
twic
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)

------
chrissdot
For all of you interested:

A Map of the Trees of Vienna
[https://www.wien.gv.at/umweltgut/public/grafik.aspx?ThemePag...](https://www.wien.gv.at/umweltgut/public/grafik.aspx?ThemePage=11)

~~~
gulbrandr
A map of the trees in Paris: [https://opendata.paris.fr/explore/dataset/les-
arbres/map/?lo...](https://opendata.paris.fr/explore/dataset/les-
arbres/map/?location=12,48.88018,2.34919&basemap=jawg.streets)

------
hn3333
Source of data: [https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/local-authority-
maintaine...](https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/local-authority-maintained-
trees) \- Which is super cool.

------
dharma1
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

------
freyfogle
Here is a service that aggregates the various public, opendata sets
[https://opentrees.org](https://opentrees.org)

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

------
DonHopkins
This, your Majesty, is the Linden tree.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoqlYGuZGVM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoqlYGuZGVM)

~~~
stevage
Thought it was going to be this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kZoTcYYio0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kZoTcYYio0)

