Honeylocusts, Ginkgos, Callery Pears, Maples & more in the 5 boroughs

April 22, 2024 10:44 AM

Previously: the official New York City tree map. Earlier this year: Kieran Healy created visualizations of "the relationship between the median diameter of street-trees (i.e., trees not in parks) and median household income for New York City neighborhoods" (for example, Park Slope versus Bushwick), dendograms of "New York City’s street tree species clustered by similarity of neighborhood profiles" (and, conversely, "the neighborhoods clustered by tree profile similarity"), and "a Principal Coordinates Analysis of New York City NTA neighborhoods and their street tree species". (NTA means Neighborhood Tabulation Area.) "I don’t really know anything about trees. I do know how to draw pictures, though."
posted by brainwane (3 comments total)

This Shouldn’t Be New York City’s Most Common Tree
The London planetree is a symbol of European settlement, biodiversity collapse, and Robert Moses.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 11:04 AM on April 22 [3 favorites]

Wow... I have been following Kieran Healy's work for ~15 years now, and his Excess Deaths in 2020 is still sort of the definitive plot of the pandemic for me.

Interesting article about the London planetrees in NYC. I'm always happy to jump on a "Robert Moses sucks" bandwagon, and a monoculture of anything is just asking for a single disease to wipe out all your tree cover. But cities just desperately need trees, more than they need birds, and more than birds need cities (maybe).

Here's an interesting canopy-mapping project from MIT that I came across while looking for other links.
posted by McBearclaw at 8:41 PM on April 22

The "New York City’s street tree species clustered by similarity of neighborhood profiles" is weirding me out because the cluster diagram they chose is also used for phylogenetic trees which show evolutionary relatedness, but these trees are absolutely not clustered phylogenetically.

All that said, amazing data work! Very cool urban ecology stuff! Hurray!
posted by hydropsyche at 3:29 AM on April 23