In Berlin there is "Gieß den Kiez"[1] (water your block). It not only shows you the species and age for every tree on public property, you can also adopt trees and be responsible for watering them.
> 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.
I have checked out my local area on that London tree map, and it appears to be accurate in details.
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?
> TreeTalk has been created on Greentalk's Platform. A proprietary technology platform which allows business/customers to promote or generate itineraries and trails based on geo-mapping and data ranging from trees to historic monuments, considering enviromental elements such as air quality, tree canopy, and more.
This is the perfect app I'm looking for. Since moving to London, I fell in love with the trees here. Knowing nothing about trees before, I carry a tiny tree atlas with me. It is challenging to look up a tree from a booklet shall I say.
Yay, a map of trees in London. Ok I'm being facecious but it'd be better if it was more widely covered. Surely we have lidar now that can delinieate different trees from the canopy data, using some ML or something...
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.
This is available in the London's datastore under open government license according to the FAQ.
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.
Each local council will have a database of all street and park trees on their land. At some regular interval they need to inspect each tree to ensure it isn't rotten or otherwise dangerous.
Often it's license incompatibilities. Even open geodata is often licensed in a way incompatible with OSM. E.g. a typical attribution requirement would require OSM data consumers to include the full list of data sources in the attribution (which is usually just mentioning the OSM contributors). So often there are individual arrangements with the respective bureaus to give the data to OSM under different conditions. For example, the cadastre data here in a southern German state is available under the condition that the attribution happens in the OSM changeset, which is much easier to fulfill (and is being done automatically in editors as soon as you have that imagery as a background layer).
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.
Apart from the excellent sibling post, the view is that data imports are hard to handle. The question of updating imported data is tricky. Most organisations who have map data think their data is the best, many times the OSM data is better than gov data in specific cases so should you overwritenthe better data just to get a complete map?
It is a tricky subject that OSM handles by not importing as much as Google.
They have data for a tree in my garden. I got the tree cut down and there was so much bureaucracy to go through just to cut it, I guess it is a protected piece of nature or something of the sort?
sure, the tree might "provide value", but you have to ask if it's providing more value that what you might have put there in its place. such as: knocking down a 2-storey house to build a 5-storey apartment building, thus letting more people live in the city, at an affordable rent, and with a short commute.
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.
>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.
Missing the Noel park friendship tree. I did my driving lessons around there and always wondered why is there a tree in the MIDDLE of a narrow residential street.
> 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.
[1] https://www.giessdenkiez.de