Parks & Recreation…and Data

Photo: Brian Dalessandro presenting at the NYC Parks DataDive
How does data analysis help the Parks department care for the city’s trees? Learn how DataKind Data Ambassador, Brian Dalessandro, analyzed Parks data to find that the Parks’ tree pruning program reduces emergency cleanups by 22%!
Check out tree census data on NYC OpenData
Check out Canopy, a project that came out of DataKind & DoITT’s DataDive event a few weeks ago.
The NYC Parks Department brought full dumps of their databases and a handful of questions. Volunteers brought their modeling, data munging, visualizing, and overall hacking skills.
Our project was provide a good understanding of what the tree diversity is like across the city, and how it is changing over time. The results are above. An interactive map where you can find all of the tree types in the city, the diversity of each census block (“diversity” being the number of unique species seen), some information about each tree type, and more. It was in a near-complete state in just one full day of work from Christopher Reed, Andrew Hill, Brian Abelson, Bennett Andrews, and myself. Chris did all of the front end work and has been updating the project relentlessly, making it better pretty much every day. Andrew set up the cartography database (CartoDB) which exposes an amazing API for querying the data. Bennett pulled in all of the tree information from Encyclopedia of Live. And Brian and I took the raw data provided by the parks department and transformed it into a workable shape.
Huge thanks to Jake Porway and DataKind for putting events like these together. For more information on DataKind, check out Jake’s talk from DataGotham.
(via radioon)


