Scientists create index to track urban tree cover
Print Edition
WHERE are the trees? More important, where aren’t the trees? A lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is helping some of the world’s cities answer both questions in an attempt to make them more pleasant places to live and work.
In an effort to enhance the critical role trees play in urban environments — providing cooling shade, alleviating air and noise pollution, and easing the effects of climate change — the school’s Senseable City Lab has developed an online platform that maps out the canopy in some major cities to make it easier for urban planners and ordinary citizens to see where more are needed.
The project, called Treepedia, uses Google Street View to create what the MIT team calls the Green View Index.
Trees block shortwave radiation and increase water evaporation, creating more comfortable microclimates and mitigating air pollution, lab director Carlo Ratti said. But they also just make people feel better, Ratti said, channeling Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s biophilia theory that humans innately seek out connections with nature.
The interactive website gives bird’s-eye views of 15 cities, with trees represented by green dots. Users can zoom into a particular neighborhood or individual street to see ground-level images.
The City of Lights apparently isn’t the city of trees. Of the cities mapped so far, Paris scores lowest with a Green View Index score of 8.8 percent.
North American cities tend to score higher than European cities. Singapore, however, ranks the highest with a 29.3 percent score, slightly ahead of Vancouver, British Columbia.
The other cities mapped so far are Amsterdam; Boston; Frankfurt, Germany; Geneva, Switzerland; London; Los Angeles; New York; Sacramento, California; Seattle; Tel Aviv, Israel; Toronto; and Turin, Italy.
More cities are being added.
“In the future, the goal of this project is to start a conversation so that cities can see how they compare with one another and how they can learn from each other,” Ratti said.
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