[OGRUG] RStudio, CIty of Ottawa Trees Dataset & Ottawa Tree Canopy Project.
Hi Joseph, I am a botanist at Agriculture Canada, and also a reasonably experienced R user. I am very interested in this project, and would be happy to contribute a either a plant biologist, an R coder or both. At present I am in the field, and won't be back to Ottawa until the beginning of June. Best, Tyler
On 17/05/14 06:39 PM, Joseph Potvin wrote:
Anyone in the OGRUG community have a bit of time & expertise to share towards advancing data-driven analysis of Ottawa's trees using R? Some current discussion is forwarded below. Note to Daniel and Erwin: OGRUG is the Ottawa-Gatineau R Users Group. Joseph Potvin ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Daniel Buijs <dbuijs at gmail.com> Date: Sat, May 17, 2014 at 5:48 PM Subject: Re: CIty of Ottawa Trees dataset To: Erwin Dreessen <erwin_dreessen at ncf.ca> Cc: "J. P. Unger" <ungerjp at yahoo.com>, Amy Kempster <Amykempster at bell.net>, "Nicole Desroches (home)" <nicolepdesroches at gmail.com>, Sol Shuster <sshuster at magma.ca>, elina.here at hotmail.com, Jason Kania <jason.kania at ymail.com>, Joseph Potvin <jpotvin at opman.ca> Hi Erwin, It would take a bit of work to turn this into an app, and I'm afraid that's a skill set that I don't have at the moment ;) I would be very happy to chat with someone technically inclined who would be interested in turning it into an app, and I could perhaps suggest some more or less straightforward ways to do that. The file that the city published is in a format that can be opened by Google Earth, but it was just so massive that I stopped waiting for it after an hour or so on my little laptop, so I figured out how to slice it up into smaller pieces with the free software package RStudio (www.rstudio.org). On the most basic level, I can take the 200 MB kml file that's on the City's website and turn it into a simple spreadsheet table that should be fairly straightforward to use in things like Google Maps. The bells and whistles, in terms of colour-coding by species, making the dot size represent tree diameter, and overlaying Xs on the ones that are being treated for Emerald Ash borer are things I figured out how to do in R for static PDF documents. I'm sure you could do things like this in a web app, I just don't know how. As far as the data itself, my understanding of what the City published is that it's an extract of their internal database that the forestry department uses anyway, so I don't think they have any dedicated resources to publishing it or have committed to any particular update frequency. The date on the dataset is April 2013. I would certainly like to see them update it on some sort of predictable schedule, but my experience with open data at the moment is that you take what you can get and don't ask too many questions. :) The City indicates that the dataset includes only city-owned street trees, so no private trees, and none of the city trees in parks or other greenspace. The data they have included is the GPS co-ordinates (which seem to line up with Google maps without any further adjustment, at least in my neighbourhood), the species of tree, diameter at breast height (no units given, but I'm guessing in cm), Ward, Street Number and Name, location of the tree in relation to the property, location of street trees that aren't associated with a civic address (i.e. medians, etc.), whether the tree is being treated for dutch elm disease or emerald ash borer, and the tree tag number for trees that are being treated. No, I'm not working with Kevin. I've only just seen his website, with your note below. I'm certainly happy to share what I've learned with anyone who's interested. I'm afraid I have no particular intent or agenda with this, I really just wanted to find out what kind of tree was kitty-corner to my house and whether the City was going to treat it for Emerald Ash Borer. In retrospect, there were perhaps less onerous ways to do this ;). Cheers, Dan On 2014-05-17, at 3:15 PM, Erwin Dreessen wrote: Hello Daniel Buijs, Thanks for this. I knew the City was brewing up various data about the city-owned trees. You're way ahead of me on the technology, but the example you gave, adapting the City's raw data, looks terrific. If this app could be made available via our web site, that would be excellent. Jason Kania is your contact if this requires anything special. Do you believe the City is committed to keeping the data current? Any idea what percent of its resources is going to this? The Tree Canopy project, as I understand it, makes no distinction between public and private trees, nor does it distinguish species. It is only concerned with tree canopy cover. Are you working with Kevin O'Donnell? (http://ottwatch.ca/) It would be good to find your app there. Regards, Erwin cc: Board, Joseph From: J. P. Unger [mailto:ungerjp at yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, May 16, 2014 10:59 PM To: Erwin Dreessen; Amy Kempster; Nicole Desroches (home); Sol Shuster; elina.here at hotmail.com; 'Jason Kania' Subject: Fw: CIty of Ottawa Trees dataset Hi! This came in... I sent a quick reply with thanks, saying I'd forward it to the chair & directors (cc'ing Joseph Potvin). JP ----- Forwarded Message ----- From: Daniel Buijs <dbuijs at gmail.com> To: contact at greenspace-alliance.ca Cc: jpotvin at opman.ca Sent: Friday, May 16, 2014 9:43:15 PM Subject: CIty of Ottawa Trees dataset Hi, Joseph Potvin forwarded a note about your upcoming meeting where you will discuss the Ottawa Tree Canopy project. I thought you might find it helpful to know (if you didn't already) that the City of Ottawa has published a dataset of City-Owned street trees, available here: data.ottawa.ca It's available as a kml file. I found the kml file a bit too unwieldy, so I wrote an R script that can extract the data into a more useful format and intelligible plot. The plot below shows the trees of the Glebe, colour coded by species, with dot sizes representing diameter. Trees marked with an X have been treated for Emerald Ash Borer. If this is useful and/or of interest to you or your group, I can share the scripts I used to extract the data and to produce the plot below. Daniel Buijs ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erwin Dreessen <erwin_dreessen at ncf.ca> Date: Thu, May 15, 2014 at 5:50 PM Subject: Greenspace Alliance AGM - Thursday, May 29, 7 p.m. To: green-news at greenspace-alliance.ca, Hello Members and Friends, You are heartily invited to the Greenspace Alliance's Annual General Meeting on Thursday, May 29, 2014, starting at 7 p.m. at the Hintonburg Community Centre, 1064 Wellington Street West (Laurel Room). Our feature presentation will be on Phase 1 of the Ottawa Tree Canopy project. Unfortunately, Regie Alam had to cancel but the project's co-leader, Eric Jones, will present in his stead, assisted by Iola Price. This is a citizen science project that is estimating the tree canopy within the urban boundary on a ward basis, using open data and open source tools. The agenda is below. Come early (6:45 p.m.) to renew your membership or apply! A brief General Meeting will follow the AGM. Hope to see many of you there. Erwin
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