This map connects you to publicly accessible green spaces in New York City. Find places you can visit like community gardens and parks, and get a sense of how green a neighborhood is by seeing street trees per block.
feature demo
Methodology
All data comes from NYC OpenData. GreenThumbs Community Gardens and Parks Properties data is fetched from the API and updates whenever the dataset is updated.
Each API query pre-selects relevant fields to keep the response data as small as possible. Parks data, for example, is constrained to Parks Properties that are public green spaces and excludes entries such as Park's buildings and jointly operated school playgrounds.
Because of API limits, the Street Trees data was downloaded, cleaned up in qGIS, and then uploaded as a custom vector tile set using Mapbox Studio's Mapbox Tiling Service. Street Trees data comes from the 2015 Street Tree Census.
The map is built with Mapboxgl JS. Everything else is vanilla HTML/CSS/JS.
Street Tree totals and charts are estimates. It was not practical to query the Street Trees API for totals so I relied on querying rendered features from the map. In some cases, particularly on mobile, the zoom level will exceed the Street Trees zoom threshold and they won't render which will show as "n/a" on the totals.
This project is done for an Information Visualization class as part of my Master's in Information Experience Design at Pratt Institute.
Published on May 3rd, 2023 Last updated on April 22nd, 2024
