Tell me Astoria

Today we drove around the approximately 600 blocks of Western Queens where Con Edison has graciously (read: court ordered) funded community tree mapping, replanting initiatives, and stewardship training and support for the next three years.  This funding is making it possible for TreeKIT to work with the Department of Parks and Rec, Partnerships for Parks, and folks just like you to get out and map the grand trees in the town centers and residential streets of Astoria, Sunnyside, Woodside, and Blissville.

On our tour today we found many valiant street trees thriving in the margins near Rikers Island, Bowery Bay Water Pollution Control Plant (capacity of 150 MGD), the Astoria Generating Station (1,280 MW fuel oil and natural gas plant), alongside the imposing stone walls topped with barbed wire of Calvary Cemetery, New Calvary Cemetery, and near the myriad metal fabrication and auto-repair shops bordering New Town Creek.

Street trees with Astoria Generating Co. in the background

 

Queens’ largest tree bed?

Living street tree growing around dead street tree along 19th Avenue.

 

Beautiful masonry that unfortunately blocks rain that falls on the sidewalk from watering the tree – note the dying branches.

 

A Tree Grows in Queens: the indomitable Ailanthus makes friends with a telephone pole. Farther down the block, really big trees are surviving and thriving: the concrete sidewalks don’t stand a chance.

 

 

 

Processing data

Data entry. It’s an unglamorous job, but someone’s got to do it. We’ve got a stack of handwritten worksheets from our summer tree mapping parties that need to be fed through a web-based form. Bit by bit, we plug in the numbers… and a map of the urban forest comes out the other end. Data entry may be a drag, but sometimes the outcome is well worth it. Besides, when else do we get a chance to catch up on listening to archives at WFMU?

DPR Contract for Feasibility Study

A huge thank you to the Department of Parks and Rec for funding a feasibility study for working with TreeKIT. It is great to finally have a bit of funding to get our online form and database working as well as enlist Sophia Parafina to get the geometry automagically drawing from the linear measurements.

Once we have this data, we will study how TreeKIT’s super-accurate spatial locations and bed dimensions could be matched up with existing city data. This will enable the migration of historical maintenance records to the correct locations, and provide the basis for stewardship applications.

 

“Calibrated citizen science” kick-off meeting

We are really excited to be on-the-ground partners for a team of serious computer vision people from five universities. This team is working on how pictures taken by smart phones could be used to maximum utility to generate up to the moment data on urban forests and the people who love them (or hate them). The kick-off meeting this afternoon was exceptionally inspiring.

Partners in Community Forestry – Philadelphia

While Phil was busy managing the Greenbridge Program at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Liz took the early Amtrak down to the Lowes Hotel in Philadelphia for the annual Partners in Community Forestry Conference. The new and improved TreeKit show pulled in an audience of a couple hundred, and we shared our 45 minutes with Kelaine Vargas who came up to the podium to demonstrate Urban Forest Map. It was great to have so many partners in the crowd ranging from Parks to NYRP to Hans (an old classmate of Kelaine and Liz), and to meet so many energetic people working all across the country on similar issues. We are really looking forward to growing together.

Upper Manhattan and the expanding TreeKit team

During the Conflux workshop we met some great folks from upper Manhattan.  Basia and Michael have been organizing neighbors and business owners and stewarding trees around Montefiore Park for several years. Beginning on October 18th, we’ve been working together to bring TreeKit to their neighborhood, not only to map trees but as a community event to engage people in the long-term plan to close the road along the park and redesign the area. On the technical side, Jen and Shira have been deriving start and end points for the area between 133rd and 154th from Convent Avenue to Riverside Drive to update the form. The points as well as contextual information like building footprints and sidewalk edges are exported from ArcGIS as KMZ and added to the Google Map on our form.

Conflux festival this Saturday — East Village

This Saturday, join us for a general TreeKIT workshop as part of the Conflux festival! This is a great time for interested individuals to get a quick orientation and go out and map a couple blocks using our simple hand tools and online map-form. We especially designed this workshop for people who would like to bring TreeKIT back to their own areas of interest. Meet us at 9am this Saturday at St. Marks Church benches – East 10th at 2nd avenue. We’ll be going until noon.

http://www.confluxfestival.org/projects/conflux-festival-2010/treekit/
http://www.confluxfestival.org/

Tree tagging brainstorm with PlanningCorps

Yesterday, nine of us (TreeKIT/PlanningCorps crew plus a few new faces) gathered on the top floor of OpenGeo to hash out some of the many ideas that have been floating around about tree tagging.

Placing tags on trees would be useful to either communicate or provide access to several types of information to people walking by:
– basic information about a tree (species, size/age, etc.)
– that the tree has been mapped by a community effort and added to a public database
– how the tree could be cared for, and how you can help
– who has been active in taking care of the tree
– other stuff

Technical-hypothetical discussions ranged from RFID, sidewalk stencils of unique IDs, portable dog tag printers, and biodegradable packs of fertilizer that could be laid over the soil. We realized that the moment when volunteers are actually out mapping is ideal for going ahead and hanging some kind of tag on the tree, but there is probably not time to hang any sort of unique ID on each tree while also rolling the wheel, recording the nearest address and all the rest of the protocol. By the end of the discussion, Brendan offered that as mappers measure a block segment, they could hang a single larger informational tag to invite locals to go online and print out their own tags for each tree, since now all that information would be part of a public database. There will be more coming on this over the leafless months.

Pratt / Fort Greene mapping party

Graduate architecture students at Pratt Institute spent classtime on Wednesday gaining basic tree identification skills and learning both the TreeKIT and Parks protocols. But yesterday, due to the havoc wreaked by the tornado, there was a bit of a scramble as we realized that it was going to be unsafe to walk through Prospect Heights due to all the debris, and we decided to focus on Fort Greene instead. So last night, we set a new mapping area, made six block maps with address labels, and adjusted the spreadsheet to include a field for “damage”. This morning, 12 students as well as professor Alex Barker met up, organized into 3 teams and set out to map the six blocks adjacent to campus.

The weather was great and we had a very successful day, helped along by a lively block party with childrens’ sing-a-longs. We saw only two street trees down in the two by three block swath south of the main campus.