Tompkins Square Park Tree Identification Project

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About Tompkins Square Park Tree Identification Project

This past spring my eye was caught by the various trees in Tompkins Sq. Park that were coming back to life, and I took a lot of photos. Then I was inspired, hearing about this project to identify all the trees in Central Park by Edward Sibley Barnard and Ken Chaya. centralparknature.com/ I've always wanted to know more about trees, and a similar project for Tompkins Square Park seemed like something I could do. I started taking more photos of all the trees, concentrating on details that would allow them to be species identified. Then one of my Flickr contacts clued me in on the tree map done by the East Village Parks Conservancy, and another Flickr pal actually had the map and gave it to me. That map was done in 1998 and needed to be updated. Plus it confused me as to the positions of the trees on the map, since many of the trees were no longer there, with different species replacing them, and all the tree icons were identical. But it was a start and was very helpful in confirming my own identifications. Since then a neighbor has shown me a lovely map made in 1981 which also identified many of the trees, but it had the same problem of ambiguity. Since then I've used Google maps as well as the excellent nyc.gov website gis.nyc.gov/doitt/nycitymap/ to help with my cartography. But as the satellite and aerial photo maps show mostly tree canopy, I had to resort to pacing distances off and using the seemingly uniform length of the iron fence segments around the park to get the locations of the trees, fences and benches as accurately as I can. This took a lot more time and effort than I hoped, but now I think I have a reasonably accurate map. And in the process I've learned a lot about trees and the park.

I'm a total novice in tree identification. I'm learning, but I hope to crowd source the trickier identifications, using the various plant identification groups on Flickr and Reddit. The innovation, I'm most proud of is making the tree icons proportional to the diameter of the trunks. This helps eliminate the ambiguity of relating uniform dots on the map with a specific trees. In other words, you can easily see that the 6 inch diameter tree in front of you refers to the young oak and the 4 foot diameter tree refers to the giant elm etc.

Now that I have the map, and a reasonable census of the trees done, I'm organizing the thousands of photos I shot this summer, and intend to weave them into an interactive site. I'll see how much function I can put into this Flickr group.

http://gammablog.com/tag/tsptip/