Identifying where private trees can benefit the public

Project Partner: Speak for the Trees Boston, Summer 2024

Project Description: Speak for the Trees is a non-profit that plants trees around the City of Boston. To maximize the benefit of the trees they distribute, they aim to plant trees in the front yards of private properties. Here, trees can provide shade to both the private property and the public street and sidewalk, and complement the tree planting work done by the City of Boston.

During her internship with Speak for the Trees, Katie utilized Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to segment land parcels and identify yards. She then integrated the front yards into Speak for the Trees’ internal decision-making tool. With this tool, they can filter front yards by fields such as the current canopy coverage of the area and whether the city has designated the area as a tree planting priority zone. These filters will help to maximize the impact of Speak for the Trees’ budget, prioritizing the community members whose yards are most in need of trees. Future work on this project will aim to filter out front yards that do not have space for trees.

Katie’s tool has earned Speak for the Trees a grant from the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation to sponsor their tree plantings in the yards that are most in need of trees.

Project Deliverables: 

  • Create a database of Boston parcel front yards
  • Integrate database information into the Speak for the Trees internal decision-making tool
A screenshot of Katie’s tool highlighting the front yards of Boston’s parcels in blue. The green represents the backyards, and the gray represents buildings on the parcels. The red buffers represent area too close to buildings, where trees cannot be planted.

 

Watch Katie’s URBAN Internship Lightning Talk here.

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