41–50 of 93 posts
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?
[1] https://www.wien.gv.at/umweltgut/public/grafik.aspx?ThemePag...
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.
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
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.
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 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 b…
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.)
Maybe 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 "a…
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.
They owe the rest of the Earth a terrible debt.
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.
They realized a bit late. Europe razed her forests. Maybe they can track their trees because they only have so many. To compare: CA is about twice as big as the UK and Californians own more forests as individuals than the UK has in total. Four times as much area in California is forest as in the UK in total. They owe the rest of the Earth a terrible debt.
California population density is ~251 people/sq mile. UK population density is ~727 people/sq mile. So the UK has almost 3x the population density, the UK simply doesn’t have oodles of unused space like the US. So a significantly reduced number of trees and forests isn’t much of a surprise.
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.
They realized a bit late. Europe razed her forests. Maybe they can track their trees because they only have so many. To compare: CA is about twice as big as the UK and Californians own more forests as individuals than the UK has in total. Four times as much area in California is forest as in the UK in total. They owe the rest of the Earth a terrible debt.
It's kind of cherry picking that you singled out CA and ignore the wastes of forests felled from the Atlantic to the rockies. We haven't done much better. It wasn't even a century ago that we had dust bowls sweeping across the great plains from so much overfarming. 100 years ago the total population of CA was 1/6 of greater London, you can't compare the UK to CA much better than an apple to an orange.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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…
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...