What's also cool is we have two posts about this and both are trending!
A Map of the Trees of London
21–30 of 93 posts
Re: A Map of the Trees of London
#22[deleted]
Re: A Map of the Trees of London
#23Maybe interesting to the HN crowd: https://www.20tree.ai/. Startup doing ML on satellite images to recognize trees, crop health and a bunch of other stuff.
Re: A Map of the Trees of London
#24I'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.
Since leafy surroundings and tree presence is one of the selling points for good properties, it would be great to align incentives of real estate agencies and such data collection efforts
Re: A Map of the Trees of London
#25Maybe interesting to the HN crowd: https://www.20tree.ai/ . Startup doing ML on satellite images to recognize trees, crop health and a bunch of other stuff.
Neat, will have to read what they're doing. I've heard of this simple approach before - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalized_difference_vegetati... using the ratio of IR / red light.
It sounds like they have very high resolution imagery though "up to 0.3m resolution", which sounds cool.
Re: A Map of the Trees of London
#26One 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/
Re: A Map of the Trees of London
#27I'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.
> "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"
There was a survey a few years back to assess the economic value of the trees in London, for pollution removal, stormwater alleviation, etc. which put the total annual benefits at £132.7M[0].
[0] https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/valuing_london...
Re: A Map of the Trees of London
#28Maybe interesting to the HN crowd: https://www.20tree.ai/ . Startup doing ML on satellite images to recognize trees, crop health and a bunch of other stuff.
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).
Re: A Map of the Trees of London
#29Glad 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)
Re: A Map of the Trees of London
#30I 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.
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,...
[2] https://www.haringey.gov.uk/sites/haringeygovuk/files/append...