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Comment by efromvt

1 month ago

A visual explorer for the trees of San Francisco.

https://greenmtnboy.github.io/sf_tree_reporting/#/

For all the places it's bad at, AI has been fantastic for making targeted data experiences a lot more accessible to build (see MotherDuck and dives, etc), as long as you can keep the actual data access grounded. Years of tableau/looker have atrophied my creativity a bit, trying to get back to having more fun.

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efromvt

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wisemang  1 month ago

Nice! I’ve been working on https://treeseek.ca which is a different use case from most of the other open data tree sites I’ve seen — I want to be instantly geolocated and shown the nearest trees to me. I do a lot of walking and am often mesmerized by a particular tree, and I wanted something to help me identify them as quickly as possible, with more confidence and speed than e.g. iNaturalist (which i do also use).

This is an app that’s been bouncing around in my head for over a decade but finally got it working well enough for my own purposes about a year and a half ago.

  • efromvt  1 month ago

    Oh that's great! I was finding fun tree collections and wanted to go see them - unfortunately not in SF so not likely - but your app has some nice data around me that I can check out! Are you primarily using OSM data?

    I was thinking of a google maps kind of "here you are, here's your walking path of interesting trees" potentially, or something else that could tie the overview to the street experience - on the backlog!

    • wisemang  1 month ago

      So the tree data itself mainly comes from municipal open data, just like yours does. Street Trees datasets are pretty common across cities. I just added SF yesterday after replying here :)

      Otherwise the map tiles are coming from OpenFreeMap [1] which are indeed based on OSM.

      Next steps I'm interested in are including economic + ecological benefits of the trees, highlighting potential pests / invasive species, maybe some other basic info about the species sourced from Wikipedia.

      I like how you've got different icons for different types of trees; I've been thinking about how to encode DBH data as well but haven't settled on anything yet.

      [1] https://openfreemap.org

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