Philip Silva, TreeKIT co-founder, was nominated to serve on the Vibrant Cities and Urban Forests National Task Force, meeting this week in Washington D.C. A picture of the team planting a magnolia from Andy Lipkis: http://twitpic.com/4ho5ao. More on this soon…
Leadership in Environmental Advocacy at Pratt presents:
(free and open to the public – please distribute widely)
“Street Trees and Urban Food: Measuring, Mapping, and Managing the Environment with Citizen Scientistsâ€
taught by Mara Gittleman & Phil Silva
WHEN: 1-3pm, Sunday March 27th
WHERE: Higgins Hall North 406
Free Lunch 3pm
Please RSVP: tylercaruso at g mail dot com
Community-generated data helps citizens coordinate and collaborate on environmental stewardship initiatives. The tools can be as simple as tape measures, scales, and a bit of code. This workshop goes into depth about three current NYC-based citizen science projects related to food justice and environmental stewardship. Following the talk, we will go an outdoor tree mapping excursion that will help build a set of tools for volunteers in central Brooklyn with TreeKIT co-founder Philip Silva and Food Census co-founder Mara Gittleman.
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.
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.