Mapping the Urban Canopy

Teachers, parents, and project managers everywhere understand that cloaking work in the guise of a technologically fueled game helps the medicine go down. It's a strategy that Baton Rouge Green, the nonprofit whose cause is preserving the city's urban canopy, is counting on.

Just last month, BRG released a free app and associated website called My Tree BR. With videos that instruct users how to measure the height and trunk-circumference of a tree, identify species, and locate the tree on the app's map, the volunteer-based effort should result in a crowdsourced survey of the trees' environmental benefits, said program director Robert Seemann.

The reported benefits that are generated once a tree has been entered—energy conserved, storm water filtered, air quality improved, etc—constitute important data points that may influence BRG's future programming and help them watch trends. But Seemann said the primary reason they adopted this app, developed by a company called Azavea, was for its educational potential.  

"When you go through the process of ID-ing and plotting a tree and taking some basic measurements, you are physically engaged with the tree," said Seemann. "And that's important. We think it's important to be aware of trees spatially, to get people outside, physically touching the trees and thinking about them and contemplating them spatially."

BRG set up a soft launch on Earth Day, when festival-goers were invited to plot trees. Their work can be seen on the My Tree BR map along with citrus trees that were mapped as part of BRG's City Citrus program. Most trees seem to be identified by their common names rather than genus and species. Either is fine with Seemann. "We want this to be engaging, not frustrating,' he said. "I can't stress enough that we aren't worried about you getting everything right. If measurements are off a little bit, that's okay. You can select 'pine' or 'oak' (instead of the exact species name); that's okay with us. You can put 'large deciduous tree.' We want you having fun with it; and with everything, you get better with practice. The main thing is giving it a shot and getting out there."  

This summer, when your kids complain of boredom, have your phone armed with this secret weapon and send them out into the great outdoors. Visit mytreebr.org to create an account or download the app by searching for "OpenTreeMap."