Developers

As longtime stewards of New York City’s trees, we understand that community participation is essential in maintaining urban forests. That’s why we are providing tools to developers to help build on our Tree Map platform and data for use in New York City and around the world.

Open Data

The foundation of the NYC Street Tree Map is the tree data managed in Parks' forestry management system. While the Tree Map gets daily updates from this management system, developers can find the most recent snapshot of the tree data set on the NYC Open Data Portal.

NYC Parks has also shared supporting data sets from the Tree Map on the NYC Open Data Portal, including data feeds for: favorited trees, eco-benefits of trees, anonymized tree-care-stewardship activity, tree edit suggestions, and stewardship groups.

In addition, we have shared all of the tree data that was collected in the 2015-2016 tree census on the NYC Open Data Portal, which served as the initial basis for the tree data within the tree map.

In the future, once additional features and reporting can be prioritized and deployed, we will subsequently prepare the codebase to be shared as an open source repository on GitHub, allowing other cities to reuse and extend the code base, and allow individual developers to highlight issues and suggest improvements and new features.

Open Source Credits

NYC Parks is indebted to the open source community for the variety of open source code that helped make the NYC Street Tree Map a reality.

Front End Open Source Code (Javascript)

Back End Open Source Code (PHP)

Open Source Content

Species leaf images were edited from source images in the Leafsnap dataset most of which were produced for the academic paper

"Leafsnap: A Computer Vision System for Automatic Plant Species Identification,"

Neeraj Kumar, Peter N. Belhumeur, Arijit Biswas, David W. Jacobs, W. John Kress, Ida C. Lopez, João V. B. Soares,

Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV),

October 2012

[paper (pdf)] [slides (pptx)] [bibtex]
Species descriptions were edited from entries in Wikipedia. Terms of Use
Economic Benefits categorization was significantly informed by OpenTreeMap, and formulas for calculating benefits utilize tables found in the otm-ecoservice project. License

Changelog

January 2, 2019

Moved to self-hosted basemap with various stylistic changes.
Fixed layout issue with some tree suggestion forms.

August 21, 2018

Replaced provider of street view images (Google to Cyclomedia)

July 20, 2018

Changed front-end map javascript library from Leaflet to Mapbox GL JS
Added open data feeds to Developers page.
Added 30 species images and replaced 17 others with improved images.

April 13, 2017

Added ability for users to report trees that are missing on the map.
Made various bug fixes and usability improvements.

February 16, 2017

Added ability for site administrators to communicate important messages via a sitewide banner.
Improved integration with tree service request system by automatically pulling in nearest address of tree to request form.
Added notifications to administrators about added, changed, and removed trees during daily sync with internal tree management system.

February 9, 2017

Added new activity type: Cleared Litter/Waste.

December 23, 2016

Improved clarity of communication in Care Captain and Tree Pruner messages.
Improved display of recent tree care activities.
Improved usability and speed of suggestion adminstration pages.
Changed tree suggestion form to ask user for circumference and calculate diameter for them instead of asking for diameter.
Added page with information about mulching activity.
Fixed an issue with location search that would return areas outside NYC.

November 3, 2016

Updates made to About and Developers pages.
Removed Beta references from Homepage, About pages and Feedback Form. And moved Feedback Form to Footer of page.
Optimized Print version of Tree Map.
Added most common species link in all contexts.
Updated various tree and addresses data issues.
Added Group section to allow users to add their activity to track Group progress.
Updated Dashboard and Group Labeling.
Added Credits To Developer Page
Updated Tree Service Request with Tree IDs and text when Reporting an issue with a tree.
Resolved various bugs found during final testing on desktop and mobile site.
Updated various Usability improvements to user interface
Updated various text edits around the site for spelling, grammar and optimizing information.

April 25, 2018

Changed from Leaflet to Mapbox GL JS client-side map-rendering library to allow better rendering of tens of thousands of trees.
Enhanced user experience of suggest a new tree reporting flow.

October 14, 2016

Added ability for users to submit corrections to the tree data.
Added ability for users to identify themselves as licenced tree pruners and to report tree pruning activity.
Added ability for users to identify themselves as Care Captains which will provide NYC Parks with valuable data about our most committed volunteers.
Added ability for users to log in to the tree map with existing Facebook and Google accounts.
Various usability improvements to user interface.

September 9, 2016

Added charts and infographics to the My Trees page, giving users a much clearer view of their efforts to impove the urban forest.
Added a profile for users where they can put in their address or zip code. Features that will give users information based on their profile location are currently in development.
Expanded ability for users to feature trees, and usability improvements to the filtering user interface.
Usability improvements for smaller screens.

July 29, 2016

Added site-wide translation option.
Added ability for users to filter trees by trunk diameter ranges.

June 3, 2016

Added a new level of detail for each borough, including statistics at the borough level.
Added Developers page.

May 3, 2016

In our second update we focused primary on performance improvements, with additional usability updates and bug fixes. The following changes have been made in the latest version.

The tree data sent to the map has be extensively streamlined and we’ve completely reworked the way that data is sent, resulting in significant speed improvements in the loading and display of trees on the map.
To reduce distraction we’ve de-emphasized the map outside of New York City.
We’ve changed the sizes of markers at various zoom levels and on mobile devices making it easier to differentiate trees and tap on trees on mobile devices.
We fixed a bug where the login screen would appear in the sidebar after a user was logged out automatically after being inactive for a long time.

March 25, 2016

In our first update after the beta release we focused on usability updates and bug fixes. The following changes have been made in the latest version.

Clicking the Report Care button on the user’s list of favorite trees now opens the report activity form on the tree detail page.
The location search will now inform the user if no match was found.
If there is no Google Street View map for a particular tree location, we now hide the map instead of showing a blank box.
Delete activity button now asks for confirmation.
The list of activities table on tree page now updates immediately once a user submits an activity.
We now identify users’ favorite trees in all views via a heart icon. We've changed this icon from green to red for greater visibility, and added a highlight when it is clicked.
Optimized menu for mobile screen size gives more space to the map and allow mobile users to use the species filter.
When users filter by species and there are no trees of that species in the current view, the map now zooms out until there are some trees in view.
If more than one user favorites the same tree, we now display the number of favorites on the tree view page.
In the species filter list we no longer list species with no trees anywhere on the map. Once trees of these species are added to the map in the future, these species will be added to the filter list.