If you look down while you fly over the city, you’ll get a good snapshot of your tree canopy. But you’ll need a better picture – a systematic tree canopy assessment – to map where your trees are and, importantly, where they aren’t.
In a tree canopy assessment, you can observe the extent to which tree canopy is equitably distributed among your community’s neighborhoods. For most cities, inequity is the norm. Neighborhoods that lack tree canopy bear much larger health and heat burdens.
According to American Forests’ Tree Equity Score, lower-income communities have 26% less tree cover and are 6°F hotter than wealthier ones, and communities of color have 38% less tree cover and are 13°F hotter.
Check out the Tree Equity Score link below. This free tool helps cities across the nation plan the future of their urban forest.
Or, if you’d prefer to do it yourself, i-Tree Canopy provides free satellite-based tools you or trained volunteers can use to produce a canopy map that’s 95 percent accurate compared to other techniques. Watch a video describing how to use i-Tree Canopy here. And for a review of currently available technology to help map tree canopy, click here.