All the trees! National Day of Civic hacking / NY Tree Census

This weekend I attended the National Day of Civic Hacking in NY which was focused on the volunteer collected tree species data here in NY. It’s an incredible data set with lots of value in understanding the (often only) access many people in New York have to Nature.

I was attending mostly as CartoDB helper for the teams (many of whom used CartoDB for their projects) but I also managed to get some time to put together some maps from the data.

The first map I made shows how the surveys themselves are collected. This animated map shows the evolution of the 2015 survey, the hard work of volunteers and the powerful effect of mapping parties can be seen in the pattern of small nucleuses of data collection spreading outwards to fill in gaps

Next, I combined the data form the 1995, 2005 and 2015 census to show the evolution of the trees in NY over the past 20 years. It’s really interesting to see the growth of trees in NY neighborhoods, esp in areas like the Bronx.

Finally to see how different neighborhoods and people from different social economic backgrounds experience nature in NY I combined the 2015 tree census with the 2014 ACS survey data at the block group level. This resulted in a dataset where each tree is tagged with the demographics of the neighborhood its in. You can grab that data from here if you want to play with it yourself.

To help explore the data I created a CartoDB Deep Insights dashboard with a number of census variables. Its fun(/depressing) to see how average tree diameter depends on economic factors like income. Your much more likely to have a beautiful large tree near you the wealthier you are

It’s been a really awesome Saturday playing with a wonderful dataset. Huge thanks to everyone who helped run the event and all the volunteers who collected the data!