By Charlie Crocker

Geoff has been kind enough to lend me his blog to share an exciting project Autodesk has been working with the City of San Francisco and the Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF). The result – an Urban Forest Mapping System – is now live and maps information on the thousands of trees in the city’s urban forest. This effort also highlights the power of collaboration between a public, private, and non-profit organization bringing great benefit to the agencies and the citizens of San Francisco.

This city-wide, dynamic on line map was developed by the San Francisco Department of Public Works’ Bureau of Urban Forestry (BUF) and FUF as a modular system that other cities and organizations can adapt to help them manage their assets – whether they are trees or any other part of the infrastructure.

The Urban Forest Mapping System was built on a hybrid platform, incorporating MapGuide Open
Source and open source Feature Data Object data access technology, using Autodesk MapGuide Studio. The system integrates the previously isolated data sets BUF and FUF each maintained. Now urban forest spatial data and inventory details from these two groups are combined and displayed on  the City and County of San Francisco’s base map data for streets, land parcels and more, to create a powerful interactive, Web-based map.

Trees (point locations) are mapped directly from the database using MapGuide Open Source. This is a very cool feature of the application because it removes the need to duplicate data sets (an all too common problem with GIS). This makes data maintenance much easier and ensures that application users always have access to the most current information.

Business rules and logic were programmed using ASP.NET C# to define and control application activity according to user, user role and to track edit history. As a result, this system offers benefits to both urban forest managers and the community. It serves as a vital, technology-based tool for tree maintenance and management, enabling managers and the public to browse,  inventory, and map existing, existing and future tree locations.

Moving forward, BUF and FUF plan to incorporate additional functionality to facilitate management and planning. Additional on line reporting tools will allow urban forest managers to model and calculate a full cost-benefit analysis to take maximum advantage in San Francisco’s many micro climates and the unique requirements for San Francisco’s diverse neighborhoods.   

Additionally, the public can take a walk through the urban forest and learn about the trees in their neighborhood with a user-friendly web interface.

Check out the map for yourself at SFTreemap.org.You can also learn more about the project’s background at Urbanforestmap.org .