Instead of expensive and time-consuming human surveys, these maps are made by AI–and could help cities figure out where they most need to plant trees.
In San Francisco, it took a team of arborists a year to map every street tree in the city–124,795 in total. In New York, a similar tree count with volunteers took nearly two years. A new algorithm, by contrast, uses AI and satellite data to map a city’s tree canopy in just hours.