Mapping All of the Trees with Machine Learning – descarteslabs-team – Medium
▻https://medium.com/descarteslabs-team/descartes-labs-urban-trees-tree-canopy-mapping-3b6c85c5c9cc
All this fuss is not without good reason. Trees are great! They make oxygen for breathing, suck up CO₂, provide shade, reduce noise pollution, and just look at them — they’re beautiful!
8th Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn last May. Look at those beautiful trees!
The thing is, though, that trees are pretty hard to map. The 124,795 trees in the San Francisco Urban Forest Map shown below, for example, were cataloged over a year of survey work by a team of certified arborists. The database they created is thorough, with information on tree species and size as well as environmental factors like the presence of power lines or broken pavement.
But surveys like this are expensive to conduct, difficult to maintain, and provide an incomplete picture of the entire extent of the urban tree canopy. Both the San Francisco inventory below and the New York City TreesCount! do an impeccable job mapping the location, size and health of street trees, but exclude large chunks within the cities, like parks.