Interact with nearly 1M NYC trees through a new digital map
Photo by Eden, Janine and Jim on Flickr
New Yorkers will now be able to interact with nearly one million of New York City’s trees through a new first-of-its-kind digital map. The NYC Parks Department last week released the NYC Tree Map, an interactive map that allows New Yorkers to see the unique IDs, species information, and maintenance status of more than 800,000 of the city’s street and park trees.
Image via the NYC Tree Map
Through the map, New Yorkers can see the exact location of each tree throughout the city, report their condition to the Parks Department, and for the first time ever, view the results of recent inspections and maintenance.
The city’s trees were mapped during Parks’ 2016-2018 Park Tree Inventory Project, a pioneering effort to count the number of trees in NYC parklands.
As a result of the project, 7,582 acres of non-forest parkland, including small parks, playgrounds, historic houses, community gardens, and neighborhood, community, and flagship parks were surveyed. Parks staff and volunteers documented the size, location, condition, and species of each non-forest tree located in these areas.
“Our New York City trees provide countless benefits to the city and residents – they provide the air we breathe, help to keep temperatures down, and manage flood waters,” Meera Joshi, Deputy Mayor for Operations, said.
“The NYC Tree Map highlights the value of these natural resources and allows New Yorkers to report trees in need of care. I want to recognize the hard work of the Parks Department for designing this map and I’m excited to see real results emerge from its use.”
According to the map, there are currently 287,298 mapped trees in Queens, 225,445 in Brooklyn, 127,655 in the Bronx, 123,875 in Staten Island, and 94,792 in Manhattan.
The map is the world’s most comprehensive and up-to-date living tree map and uses the same data and real-time access that Parks Foresters have on the ground.
Parks recently committed to a variety of tree canopy expansion efforts, one of which will use a $112 million allocation from the Adams administration to plant new trees in areas that are currently lacking greenery.
In February, all five of the city’s borough presidents called upon Mayor Eric Adams to plant one million new trees by 2030 and follow through on a pledge made in his campaign to commit one percent of the city’s budget to the Parks Department.
Last month, Brooklyn Council Member Lincoln Restler announced a plan to plant 3,400 trees in vacant street tree pits across Brooklyn’s District 33 in an effort to max out the area’s street tree capacity.
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