A couple of interesting anomalies on the map of London highlight complexities in our system of local government.
Hyde Park shows as an empty space. Hyde Park does contain trees, but the park is administered by the Royal Parks Commission, which is controlled by central government, not by the Greater London Assembly directly or indirectly.
And in South West London there is a large expanse where the only trees are along the A23 road which goes from South London to Brighton. I presume that the local (borough) authority doesn't collect tree data here. But that road, like many large through roads, is controlled by Transport for London, not the borough.
Yeah, there's a lot of interesting administrative quirks like that throughout the database. And there are kind of interesting details about exactly which types of trees are catalogued. Generally the data I've been finding and incorporating is where every tree has been individually planted, managed, catalogued.
There also occasionally exist data about natural bushland that has also been audited, but sometimes also bushland that has been sort of described in aggregate.
And then there are datasets of significant trees only (as opposed to every tree within a given park/roadside...).
I wish there were datasets of trees on private land too - they'd be much more useful for ecology etc.
For what it’s worth, when it was posted here before, I raised an issue with a link to an additional data source as requested, and it’s still open five years later. I don’t think this is actively maintained.
Oh, hi! I was just trying to figure out why there was suddenly a bunch of data source suggestions.
Is it "dead"? Hmm. It's complicated. It's true the data hasn't been updated in a long time. The biggest issue is that most of the data sources that were present on OpenTrees are no longer online.
So if I do a fresh harvest and rebuild, a lot of that data will disappear, which is a bit sad.
I'm in two minds about what to do, and have been for a long time.
Ah yeah, that's a tough position to be in. Perhaps keep the old data but flag it as stale somehow?
Could also be cool to try to somehow load some of this data into OpenStreetMap -- then if the sources go away, local mappers can potentially pick up the torch.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 50.2 ms ] threadApparently they get a lot, even more than 12 years later: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-21/tree-love-letters-for...
Hyde Park shows as an empty space. Hyde Park does contain trees, but the park is administered by the Royal Parks Commission, which is controlled by central government, not by the Greater London Assembly directly or indirectly.
And in South West London there is a large expanse where the only trees are along the A23 road which goes from South London to Brighton. I presume that the local (borough) authority doesn't collect tree data here. But that road, like many large through roads, is controlled by Transport for London, not the borough.
Yeah, there's a lot of interesting administrative quirks like that throughout the database. And there are kind of interesting details about exactly which types of trees are catalogued. Generally the data I've been finding and incorporating is where every tree has been individually planted, managed, catalogued.
There also occasionally exist data about natural bushland that has also been audited, but sometimes also bushland that has been sort of described in aggregate.
And then there are datasets of significant trees only (as opposed to every tree within a given park/roadside...).
I wish there were datasets of trees on private land too - they'd be much more useful for ecology etc.
We're around 31M trees now
For what it’s worth, when it was posted here before, I raised an issue with a link to an additional data source as requested, and it’s still open five years later. I don’t think this is actively maintained.
I turn to https://calscape.org a lot for inspiration and information on plants and trees to plant in my California garden.
Is it "dead"? Hmm. It's complicated. It's true the data hasn't been updated in a long time. The biggest issue is that most of the data sources that were present on OpenTrees are no longer online.
So if I do a fresh harvest and rebuild, a lot of that data will disappear, which is a bit sad.
I'm in two minds about what to do, and have been for a long time.
So, it's not "dead", it's just very indecisive.
Could also be cool to try to somehow load some of this data into OpenStreetMap -- then if the sources go away, local mappers can potentially pick up the torch.