This project seeks to highlight the ecological, cultural, and social history of New York City from the perspective of trees. Taking data from the NYC Park’s Great Trees of NYC initiative, I created a tree-inspired data visualization poster, reflecting uniqueness of Great Trees. My goal is to encourage public participation in nominating more trees, expand the initative, and preserving these urban treasures.
The Great Trees Search was an New York City wide initiative started by NYC Parks, celebrating the historical, botanical, and cultural significant of trees across the city. In 1985, and again in 2024, NYC Parks initiated the Great Trees Search and announced the results of public nominations process, which currently lives on their website. Anyone can nominate a great tree in their neighborhood. And this poster pays homage to the Great Trees Search initiative.
This is the final iteration of the poster I created for my project, The Great Trees of New York City: Celebrating Our Urban Forest. The reason why I want to create a poster is to bring the Great Trees of NYC database offline, and spread awareness about this excellent initiative.
Data from the NYC Great Trees initiative (locations, categories of significance, nomination details, size, species and some photos are available).
Great Trees Map: https://www.nycgovparks.org/facilities/great-trees
Full NYC Tree Map from NYC Parks: https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/
TreesCount! 2015-2016 Street Tree Census: https://www.nycgovparks.org/trees/treescount
This project focuses on storytelling through data, blending ecological, historical, and cultural narratives to emphasize the communal and personal connections New Yorkers have with their urban forest. By leveraging tree-like visualization techniques, the project will create a visual homage to the Great Trees while inviting further community engagement.
I found Octoparse, a free web data scraping tool for the data collection. Took me a few hours to learn but probably is a lot more accurate than my manual labor.
I was able to built a custom data extraction work flow with Octosparse and retrieved data from all 5 boroughs.
Screenshot of workspace of Octospare Desktop.
I used Google sheet for organizing scraped data and manually went through them. With the help of Chat GPT, I cleaned up the formatting of all data sets and put together a master spreadsheet of the Great Trees in all 5 boroughs of NYC. Funny enough, I found some mistake in the data on the official NYC Parks website.