Every Tree counts with TreesCount.

After reports suggested that different trees can affect air pollutants in a varied way, an initiative in New York City has mapped every tree in its boroughs to measure the ecological and financial benefits of urban vegetation with encouraging results.

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Upon recent reports of the varied effects certain trees can have on urban and pollution levels, in 2015 New York State Urban Forestry Council established its new inventory of all the trees on New York City’s streets. This was the first census to use volunteer citizens as primary data collectors.

Citizen engagement is essential to raise awareness for to maintaining urban ecosystems. New York City has trained and encouraged individuals and community partners from environmental non-profit organisations, business districts, youth boards and local communities to map their neighbourhoods. Since May 2015, nearly 685,000 trees have been mapped.

This information will provide useful information to investigate and improve the management of urban trees and asses trends in their health, diversity, growth and effects on their environment. By analysing the tress adaptations to climatic changes such as harsh winters, hurricanes and pollution, the data will also be helpful when knowing where to target tree planting programs in specific areas and how much money to allocation in each particular project.

Volunteers were essential in the completion of this project, where events have been carried out in all five boroughs of the city to encourage volunteers to engage in this initiative.

Additionally, The Parks Digital Media team and the Stewardship Division have launched an interactive tool that allows tree stewards to adopt their trees, record their tree care, locate these trees, filtering them by size and specie and then report any problems. The census is extensive, with nearly 250,000 trees mapped in Queens and 180,000 in Brooklyn alone, with 213 different species registered and with detailed reports of activities being carried out on each specific tree that is registered, giving a unique identity to every species of tree inside New York City.

With the census completed, the Parks department has set out to calculate the ecological and financial benefits of the trees in each borough.

Amazing benefits:

A look at the interactive page will allow readers to learn some of impressive facts about how trees are benefiting New York City, not only environmentally, but financially. Each specific report will allow the Parks department to see which trees are most beneficial. For now, from 684,055 mapped trees, from 213 different species, the most common species is the London Planetree (88,168 trees, 13% of trees on the map). The ecological benefits of all the trees are noteworthy:

1,100,382,152 gallons of storm-water was intercepted each year by the trees, at a value of $10,893,777. From this, 674,814,424 kWh of energy was conserved at a value of $6,734,746.

627,221 tons of Carbon dioxide is reduced each year, saving $4,189,804. With all this, the total value of Annual Benefits reaches $111,200,660.

How is this data collected?

This image from the New York State Urban Forestry Council website shows how data is collected in this project.

The trees are monitored using an accurate method developed by TreeKIT, the web app uses geospatial imagery to allow citiezens to choose specific blocks and upload the data of their trees in real time.

By encouraging voluntary work and providing useful information and an efficient mapping system, the TreesCount initiative should serve as reference for other key cities currently adopting measures to monitor the ecological landscape in their city centres and to adopt the correct measures to reduce emissions and save money.