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NYC Street Trees by Species, a Map by Jill Hubley

A photo posted by Local Ecologist (@localecologist) on


One of the best things I did last year was to volunteer as a TreesCount2015! tree counter. I attended a presentation by Jaclyn Shanley hosted by Trees New York. Then I recruited a co-trainer from my neighborhood's mothers' list serve and founded Washington Square Tree Counters. Annie and I attended co-trainer training events then hosted mapping events of our own. Over the course of 4 events with 53 attendees as well as independent mappers, Washington Square Tree Counters mapped 99.7% blocks in our census area for a total of 1, 139 trees!

A photo posted by Local Ecologist (@localecologist) on


TreesCount2015! is ongoing. Staff and independent mappers are mapping this winter and voluntreers will resume mapping when trees leaf out. The current city-wide tally is over 527,000 trees representing 132 on 103,514 blocks counted by 8,263 voluntreers, staff, and independent mappers. Check out the progress map here.

The City's census progress map doesn't show individual trees. If you want to see individual street trees and their species, you are in luck. Jill Hubley used census data from 2005 to create her New York City Street Trees by Species map. There are 168 species recorded city-wide but only the top 52 species are color coded. The map also contains information about trunk diameter. All the images in this post are screenshots of Jill Hubley's map.


The distribution of street trees across New York City's boroughs.


The distribution of the London plane tree. The London plane tree is the most common street tree species in New York City according to the 2005 street tree inventory.


The distribution of the tulip tree, one of my favorite trees.

Explore the NYC Street Trees by Species map. You can learn about the coding behind the map in a guest post Jill Hubley wrote for Visualoop. Let us know your favorite species. And as always, thanks for reading.

P.S. There is a map of the trees is Washington Square Park at www.wspecomap.org.

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