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A Map of the Trees of London

ianvisits.co.uk

71–80 of 93 posts

Re: A Map of the Trees of London

#71

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.

Unfortunately I've noticed that a lot of development in the UK now starts with razing the area to the ground rather than working with the existing plant life. Even when trees are considered the results are often not good. Milton Keynes had a famous oak tree that became a centre piece of a shopping centre. The tree soon became diseased and eventually died.

Re: A Map of the Trees of London

#72

A Jupyter Notebook with the trees of Copenhagen: https://hub.gke.mybinder.org/user/jessalfredsen-notebooks-8k...

Binder needs a link to the root, like so: https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/jessalfredsen/notebooks.git/maste... The link to the started notebook is not persistent :)

Re: A Map of the Trees of London

#74
post #23

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.

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.

That's a simple rules based approach and any undergraduate can click a couple buttons and classify land cover with different spectral reclectances (at X wavelength) on a pixel or superpixel basis. The more interesting stuff is when you feed this information into ML

Re: A Map of the Trees of London

#76

Melbourne has the same thing, except they gave each tree an email address so the public could send alerts about the trees condition. But instead they sent love letters and messages to each tree. Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-12/people-are-emailing-t...

How is that working out?

One challenge it seems ever locale is dealing with is a large faction of people who cannot see the forest for the trees, so to speak. It seems everywhere I've lived, there are large factions of folks who cite individual trees in their neighborhoods as fodder to shoot down environmental projects.

I've seen light rail, bus lines, and other public transit; bike and pedestrian facilities like sidewalks; dense sustainable housing on transit corridors; PV and passive solar energy projects; contaminant removal and other soil/water quality mitigation efforts; and a slew of other projects backed by environmental organizations and non-profits get shut down because of neighbors defending individual trees. It's gotten to the point where I've become very cynical towards efforts to "save the trees" because so often it means "save the trees in my direct viewshed, even if it means cutting down hundreds of trees outside of town to build sprawling subdivisions there instead."

Are there places that are getting this balance to be healthier? Fostering a love for an urban canopy while also a general recognition that some trees coming down is necessary to repair ecologically poor planning decisions of the past 70 years or so?

Re: A Map of the Trees of London

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If feel like you’re arrogantly ignoring the fact that California is part of the much larger US economy, and all the benefits that entails. And that despite the so called “good power sources” California still emits almost double the Co2 per capita than the UK (CA ~10 ton / capita; ~6 ton / capita; for 2017). You’re also forgetting that most of the UKs deforestation periods occurred during World Wars I & II, so the US…

I'm carbon negative. I'm probably at the 0.01% in this world. Europe has led the world down a dark path and she needs to heal the wounds she has given Mother Earth. Per-capita isn't as useful a measure as carbon intensity (/km^2) or carbon efficiency (/dollar). At this point, if the UK stopped doing its slow-motion destruction of the planet and started creating more with less, it can still redeem itself for the harm…

> I'm carbon negative. I'm probably at the 0.01% in this world.

I’m sure the UK has plenty of carbon negative people too, so you being carbon negative is nothing to write home about, and quite frankly irrelevant to your argument.

> Europe has led the world down a dark path

Right so Europe has been the worlds primary superpower for the last 50 years, not the US. And the US hasn’t been an independent nation for almost 300 years. I clearly missed that memo.

> Per-capita isn't as useful a measure as carbon intensity (/km^2) or carbon efficiency (/dollar).

I also don’t see the relevance of either carbon intensity or carbon efficiency. Carbon intensity just shows that CA is a large land mass, and carbon efficiency, well the UK is more “carbon efficient” at 139kg/$ compared to CA’s 154kg/$, so the UK is 10% more efficient (2017 figures, GDP/Co2).

> At this point, if the UK stopped doing its slow-motion destruction of the planet and started creating more with less, it can still redeem itself for the harm it's done all of humanity present and future.

Looking at the stats, it appears it’s CA that has some catching up todo. Not the UK.

Re: A Map of the Trees of London

#78

London has its own tree, the London plane. It's a hybrid of the American sycamore and the Oriental plane that supposedly grew when they were planted next to each other in Vauxhall Gardens in the 17th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus_%C3%97_acerifolia

These are all over Pittsburgh!

https://www.birdsoutsidemywindow.org/2019/03/28/the-trees-ar...

> planted in Pittsburgh in the late 1800s because they’re tolerant of air pollution

Re: A Map of the Trees of London

#79
For a map of the trees of Adelaide, Agen, Ajax, Alblasserdam, Allentown, Amersfoot, Amherst, Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Anaheim, Antwerp, Arganda del Rey, Arnhem, Assen, Auburn, Aurora, Austin, Bakersfield, Ballarat, Barcelona, Barendrecht, Barrie, Basel, Bayonne, Belfast, Bendigo, Berkeley, Berlin, Birmingham, Bologna, Bonn, Bordeaux, Boroondara, Boulder, Bozeman, Bretagne, Brimbank, Bristol, Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Buffalo, Burnside, Calgary, Cambridge, Cape Coral, Cary, Champaign, Charlottesville, Chemnitz, Chestermere, Chile (OSM), Colac-Otways, Colombus, Colorado Springs, Copenhagen, Corangamite, Cornell University, Craig-y-Nos, Cupertino, Cáceres, Delft, Den Haag, Denver, Divonne-les-Bains, Dordrecht, Dundee, Durango, Edinburgh, Edmonton, Eindhoven, Escondido, Fingal, Frankfurt, Geelong, Gelsenkirchen, Gent, Glen Eira, Glenelg, Grand Paris Seine Ouest, Grand Paris Sud, Grenoble, Groningen, Guingamp, Haarlem, Halle, Hamburg, Hamburg Hafen, Hilversum, Hobart, Hobson's Bay, Hudson River Park, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Jena, Kamloops, Karlsruhe, Kelowna, Kitchener, Köln, Las Vegas, Launceston, Leipzig, Lelystad, Lethbridge, Linz, Lisbon, London, Longueuil, Luxembourg, Lyon, Madison, Madrid, Manlleu, Manningham, Maple Ridge, Marysville, Melbourne, Metz, Missisauga, Moncton, Monterrey, Montpellier, Montreal, Mountain View, Mulhouse, Naperville, Nevers, New West, New West, New York, Nice, Nichols Arboretum, Nijmegen, North Vancouver, Oakville, Orléans, Oslo, Ottawa, Oxnard, Pacific Grove, Palmerston North, Paris, Perth, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Placentia, Port Phillip, Portland, Portland, Oregon, Prince George, Prospect, Prospect, Providence, Quebec City, Regina, Rennes, Rennes, Repentigny, Richardson, Rochester, Roosendaal, Rostock, Saint Quentinois, Saint-Egrève, San Francisco, San Jose, San Jose, San Jose, Santiago de Compostela, Sarasota, Seattle, Seine-Saint-Denis, Sevilla, Shepparton, Sherwood Arboretum, Sioux Falls, Sliedrecht, Southern Grampians, Springfield, St Augustine, St Catharines, Strathcona, Surrey, Sydney, Three Rivers, Tilburg, Toronto, Torrent, Toulouse, Troisdorf, Trädportalen, UNT, Ulm, Umea, Unley, Utrecht, Valencia, Vancouver, Versailles, Victoria, Victoriaville, Vienna, Villa_Manin, Waite Arboretum, Wake Forest, Wallonie-Bruxelles, Washington, Washington DC, Waterloo, Welland, Wesel, West Chester, Westerville, Weston, White Rock, Winnipeg, Wodonga, Wylie, Wyndham, Yarra, York, York, York, Zaanstad, or Zvartewaterland, you can try https://opentrees.org

Re: A Map of the Trees of London

#80

London has its own tree, the London plane. It's a hybrid of the American sycamore and the Oriental plane that supposedly grew when they were planted next to each other in Vauxhall Gardens in the 17th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus_%C3%97_acerifolia

These are all over Pittsburgh! https://www.birdsoutsidemywindow.org/2019/03/28/the-trees-ar... > planted in Pittsburgh in the late 1800s because they’re tolerant of air pollution

They are all over everywhere! They're one of the most popular street trees in many cities around the world. Incredibly robust, hardly susceptible to any insects, etc etc.
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