Our final presentation is two weeks from today! With that in mind, we are continuing work on our deliverables that we described in detail last week. After our midterm presentation last Thursday, our partners provided useful feedback and suggested some new ideas. If you want to check out our poster, shown in the photo below, you can find it here: Trees Midterm Poster.
We enjoyed hearing their thoughts and receiving confirmation for the work we are doing. Here are a few of the things we learned:
For the interactive visualizations:
Want: Our partners wanted to search for a location by address. Since the presentation, we have added this feature.
Liked: Our partners found visualizing the distribution and type of trees very helpful. We watched them point out areas on the map where they shouldn’t plant certain types of trees because there are already enough of that type.
Identify tracts of forest within a city:
Want: One attendee recommended that we look into foreclosed land for purchases. They would also like to have a list of all of the parcels for each contiguous tract of forest. Since there are 9000, this might prove difficult, but we can narrow it down by size and other attributes.
Liked: Our partners found the idea of looking at contiguous sections of land helpful.
Identify planting sites:
Want: At the midterm presentation, we were able to show static maps of potential planting sites. They would like it to be interactive – which is precisely what we are now working on.
Liked: Our partners liked having data to back up decisions based on their knowledge grounded in experience, or tacit knowledge. Now they have explicit knowledge to show what they know.
Another request was to have all of the information at an NPU level for planning purposes, including a list of parcels within the NPU. NPU-level analysis already exists, and it will be easy to provide a list of parcels within the NPU. This will also be accessible via the web application.
With these ideas in mind, we’re moving forward with our interactive web application based on parcel and NPU data. We’ve come across a recent challenge with the accuracy of the parcel data, involving duplicated features for properties like apartment and condominium buildings. It’s taken a good chunk of our time, but we are moving past it quickly.
Our focus over the next two weeks will be finalizing the data, developing the application, testing it with our partners, reiterating, and preparing for the final presentation. We’ll be working hard!