Have you ever wondered what type of tree you were passing along Toronto
streets, or how much of a difference these neighbourhood trees make for
energy conservation and air quality? This data is all available and
can be made user friendly and accessible to visitors and residents of
Toronto. Today Toronto Open Data has released records of size,
location and species (type of tree) for over 530,000 street trees to
enable this Random Hacks of Kindness project to create a website or
mobile application. Tree species descriptions and economic valuation
of tree benefits are readily available from linking to existing sites.
A precedent project is there to inspire the project and to build upon,
this is the mobile application for street trees in New York City,
Trees Near You.
When you enter the address or click my position, a screen could pop up with the following fields: 1. An image of the leaf; 2. The common name for the tree; 3. The botanical name for the tree; 4. A brief description of the tree; 5. The address in the database associated with the tree; 6. The description using a locator system or text where the tree is on the right of way; 7. the estimated annual value of the ecological benefits for the tree in a dollar value, and perhaps represented as a pie chart by related benefits such as carbon sequestration, energy conservation, pollutant up take, etc.
A user might use this simply to learn more about the trees in their neighbourhood but could also use it to protect the trees, ie. A call to 3-1-1 Toronto (city services number) might be: "hello, my neighbour at XX Jones Avenue has a large white oak that is being disturbed by repaving and widening the driveway. Can the city please inspect and protect the tree".
The data is now available via Toronto Open www.toronto.ca/open. The limitiations of the data are available in the information notes.
Perhaps a tree in front of a home needs work, (the tree located within the City right of way), and the resident wants to request an inspection. Now the resident can call 3-1-1 Toronto and provide much more information that will help City staff locate the right tree, and even help prioritize service based on the type of tree, (some tree species are more prone to holding deadwood then others) ie, "hello, I have a very large silver maple tree in front of my home and one branch is hanging over the street that appears dead."
New York City has a similar tree application for mobile users called Trees Near You. As well as the name of the tree the app uses the size of the tree with the species to provide a calculation of the value of the ecological benefits of the tree annually. This part of the New York application is based on data from the site www.treebenefits.com/calculator/.
This tree benefits site could be used for a Toronto application as well, the values associated with the northeast U.S. are generally applicable in southern Ontario based on the level of detail of the application.
Parks, Forestry and Recreation worked with the U.S. Forest Service to estimate ecological benefits for the entire urban forest of Toronto recently, www.toronto.ca/trees/pdfs/Every_Tree_Counts.pdf . Providing this information on a tree by tree basis can be very helpful for residents.
- Geoserver with OpenStreetMap Street maps for the Greater Toronto Area
- Django providing API for comments, geocoding and tree informations
- PostgreSQL with PostGIS for Street Tree Data
To install the software you'll need a running Geoserver. We've made a database dump available on the downloads section of this reposistory. For comments, street names lookup and pictures you'll need to run the django app. More detailed instructions will follow.
You will find some docs here in the future, in the meantime you can watch our faboulous and awesome presentation here