Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree may not be the first affair that comes to mind when you fancy boastful cities , but they ’re an of the essence part of many urban landscapes . By maintain a healthy tree population , a metropolis canclean the air , provideshadeto building , and improvethe quality of lifeof its occupant .
To measure the impact Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree have , official first need to keep track of how many grow within metropolis limits — a task that ’s harder than it sound . Even with thousands of volunteers play on the priming coat , add up all the tree in a city like New York can take year , according toCity Lab , and such surveys often do n’t account for the trees growing in parks or on private property . Using artificial intelligence service , researchers at the geospatial analytics startupDescartes Labshave found a direction to map all the trees in major city without taking to the streets .
To make the New York tree diagram map below , Descartesprogrammeda machine read model to distinguish tree canopies from artificial satellite image . This is n’t as well-heeled as nail fleeceable spots : The political platform had to be taught to signalise tree diagram from other verdure , like pasture and shrubs , using artificial intelligence . This gear up it apart from other tools used to map botany like the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index ( NDVI ) , which only account for light wavelengths , not summit .
When applied to New York , the tree - mapping technology provides a different view of the city . Some of the most heavily trafficked areas , like downtown Brooklyn and Times Square , are blank spaces on the mapping . Not surprisingly , parks like Forest Park in Queens and Central Park in Manhattan have the dull concentrations of tree diagram , but some moneyed neighborhoods , like the West Village and the Upper East Side , also have plenty of greenery .
New York ’s vegetation may be impressive by some city ’s standard , but it ’s nothing compared to what it was 400 eld ago . Here ’s what Manhattan look like in1609 .
[ Planck’s constant / tCity Lab ]
