Incredible... I am flabbergasted that 1: this data is collected and shared, 2: there is some good soul who figured out how to gather these sources and make it available to the world.
I would love an app that lets me walk my city, picture trees and expand the data set.
I highly recommend “picture this”. It’s AI tree identification is so good! It doesn’t let you link to open trees though, afaik. Maybe they would be willing to add that.
Something that jumped out to me as I browsed around Edinburgh is the app highlighting Japanese Knotweed as a "very rare" tree. It's actually a very invasive species that's almost impossible to get rid of.
Yep, the definition of "rare" is literally how many instances of that exact species name in the database. You can have extremely common trees marked as "rare" if they are rarely planted in urban contexts.
This argument sounds to me like security through obscurity [1], the same way some people incriminate emergency evacuation maps of buildings when there is a shooting because they helped attackers find their way inside...
Worldwide shared knowledge versus protection against potential attacks.
> It happens more often than people think
This argument seems to be a strawman, what is the real probability of a wood thief to commit their business, and in particular with the help of that map?
It depends on the location, solid high probability for some areas, specially in the years of the big scam.
I remember three perfectly healthy old lebanon cedars, maybe four, and one... not two, ancient beech vanishing like a poof at night from public parks just in my city in the last years. Trees with soft wood or palms (easy to transplant, not valuable wood) are always respected for some reason. Hard wood ancient trees or old conifers were systematically chopped down in other cities also. Is a pattern easy to follow. Always the same pool of species.
And is not just in the public spaces. I remember also an old Mimosa tree, a cherry tree that I planted and was chopped in the weekend last month, and a lot of trees removed in the river bank in the last ten years under several excuses.
Stealing wood or firewood is serious money and a low risk crime. Most people don't understand how expensive are those things. Or don't bother to say anything when one rare hardwood tree 100 Yo is replaced at night by two tiny 2 Yo, fast growing and cheap as a rat species. For most people all trees are the same green thing. The statistics say that the number of trees in the city increased by 2 and everybody is satisfied.
In the end security always works by making life harder for attackers. Cryptography works by obscuring the private key, you can just try out all possible keys, but that is made so difficult that it’s practically impossible. All bike locks can be broken, but already the weakest will prevent opportunity thefts. Security by obscurity makes sense when you don’t have other means.
I find the parent comment very weird. Wood thieves go into forests, and would probably be deterred by other people living in cities.
The data is all open data. If someone was interested in somehow vandalising a certain species of tree near them, they could already find the data on their local open data portal.
Jealous of you guys in Bologna, and also the folks in Villa Manin: the only municipalities in Italy listed there. I dare to say, probably the only ones doing a good work collecting and publishing data.
