On an afternoon when I was going through a 40-hour fast, I needed something to keep my mind busy (from thinking about food). So I decided to learn about trees in San Francisco, in particular, street trees.
Do you know…
- All street trees in San Francisco are cared and maintained by San Francisco Public Works.
- But, if you want to plant, remove, or prune a street tree, you can apply for a permit!
- Not any type of trees could become street tree. Yes, there are competitions! Here is the list of recommended trees.
- Significant and Landmark Trees: “trees on private property and within 10 feet of the public right-of-way designated as extra special and receive the same protections as all our street trees.”
- At some point during the pandemic, a group of authors and tree lovers organized Social Distancing Tree Tours around the city of San Francisco. By “organized”, I mean they painted the directions and the tree names on the street. I had the honor to “attend” the Buena Vista tour.
I love trees and I’m fascinated by trees, but I didn’t know much about street trees. After this micro project, I’ve learned a lot more, not only about trees, but also about the streets of San Francisco – my favorite city.
The data
- Source: Data.sfgov.org
- Format: CSV file, 43MB
- Rows: 195K
- Columns: 18
- Each row is a: Street tree
Understanding the data
There are 18 columns, but I didn’t use all of them for this micro project. Here are some of the important ones:
| TreeID | Unique id of tree | |||
| qLegalStatus | Legal status: Permitted or DPW maintained | |||
| qSpecies | Species of tree | |||
| qCaretaker | Agency or person that is primary caregiver to tree. Owner of Tree | |||
| PlantDate | date tree was planted | |||
| Latitude & Longitude |
I extracted the common names of the Species instead of the scientific names, and created another column for them.
The approach
- Data cleaning (checking null values, replacing null with numbers or strings…)
- Creating reports
- Creating the dashboard
View the dashboard on Tableau Public.
The results
Top 5 common types of street trees in San Francisco:
- Sycamore: London plane
- Brisbane Box
- Victorian Box
- Indian Laurel Fig Tree
- Red Flowering Gum
Top 3 statuses of street trees in San Francisco:
- Maintained by Public Works
- Undocumented (–> probably old trees that were not documented)
- Permitted site
Are we planting new trees?
Yes! But since there are a lot of null values, we can’t 100% say that we planted more street trees than we did before.
Tree allocation across the city
- Trees that are maintained by Public Works gather in groups in different neighborhoods.
- Private trees are distributed all around the city.
Hope you enjoy this little exploration. Any feedback is highly appreciated!