Organised Editing/Activities/Yerevan Tree Map
Yerevan Tree Map
Yerevan Tree Map is a grassroots initiative by the Kanach Yerevan movement, aimed at creating and maintaining a complete database of trees in Yerevan, Armenia. The initiative started in March 2024, when local authorities cut a significant amount of mature trees in the downtown, which caused uproar and protests among people, questioning competence, goals and corruption of the entity performing the work. One of the responses from the community was an initiative to collect all available information on all trees and green areas, including measurements and imagery. The main idea is to have proof that trees that were cut weren't actually broken or sick, but we are happy to share this data with a wider community for any other purpose.
When starting, we researched other similar projects, including the NYC Tree Map and Treezilla. We created our own open-source software to implement all this. We have our own database to work with the data. It was always the intend to share the data with the OSM community asap, for many reasons, but we didn't have enough development resources for this until December 2024. Currently we're doing bidirectional synchronization: we're pulling new trees in the area into our database, where volunteers can double-check tree parameters and current state, then we send updates back to the OSM.
Data Model
We only work with nodes tagged as natural=tree. Other tags we add or update on those nodes:
- height=*
- circumference=*
- diameter_crown=*
- genus=*
- species=*
- image=* — points to a page with photos of the tree.
Import plan
We collected information about around 4,5k individual trees. They were added to OSM as new nodes in changesets of up to 100 trees at once, one per hour. We plan to push further updates to the collected data, as we receive them from the app users, keeping the same rate of up to 100 changes per hour.
An example changeset can be found here. The source code for the data exchange tool is here.
Contact
You can contact Vladimir at <hex@umonkey.net> with any questions. We also read changeset comments and reply to them.
Community Consultation
We contacted the local community (OSM Armenia) using the Telegram channel which is the only available channel.
Hashtag
We'll be using hashtag #YerevanTreeMap with our edits.
Timeframe
We started collecting data in May 2024. We started sending collected data to OSM in January 2025. We don't plan to stop, as the idea is to inspect all trees, then keep them updated.
Tools and Data Sources
We are using our own open-source web application to collect data in the fields. The primary source of data is manual survey conducted by volunteers using phones. We are also experimenting with drone mapping, all data is also uploaded to OpenAerialMaps.
We consider our data public domain.
Participants
Our core team consists of the following OSM users:
umonkey (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)
Greg91 (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)- YerevanTreeMap (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.) — a service account used for data exchange
Training/Instructions
We perform regular plain airs with new volunteers to introduce them to our mobile app, teach them how to measure trees correctly and how to position them. We also have some video instructions on how to use the application and measure trees.