In San Francisco, it took a team of arborists a year to map every street tree in the city–124,795 in total. In New York, a similar tree count with volunteers took nearly two years. A new algorithm, by contrast, uses AI and satellite data to map a city’s tree canopy in just hours.
“You can use either aerial imagery or satellite imagery to do basically the same task, but a lot faster,” says Aidan Swope, a Caltech undergrad who created the algorithm as an intern at the tech startup Descartes Labs.
Image: Baltimore - Image: courtesy Descartes Labs
