Comment by 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.
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!
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
Yeah I have a 'species' info table that's built by curating wikipedia and a few other sources and passing them through a structured LLM pipeline; ecological benefit; blooming season; native regions, etc. This is very much a 'rough cut' at the moment; I want to put more quality gates and evals in it. If you're interested in collaborating all the raw parquet datasets I have are in a public GCS bucket - happy to have them pulled in anywhere else!
DBH I'm doing for the "size" right now, though I'd love to figure out how to get canopy shape/size as well, and height where possible. (and then maybe proxy height a species level from DBH, since that's more common).
(apologies for belated response)