Boston Logger
A map of Boston’s trees and how they’re changing.
The Inventory
Boston is a beautiful city, and it owes that reputation, in part, to its trees. Every year, the Boston Parks and Recreation Department (BPRD) spends thousands of hours cataloging, maintaining, and planting trees. This data is stored in their database.
That inventory is useful but hard to browse, and it keeps no historical records. Boston Logger is my attempt to make the data easier to view and to keep a history of these trees.
The Website and Archive
I built bostonlogger.com as a simple tool to visualize and explore the data. Using built-in filters, you can look at different neighborhoods, species, and other tree attributes across the city.
As part of the website, I also run a handful of simple scripts that poll, compare, and store data from the BPRD’s database. Each change is logged to a SQLite database, preserving a history of the trees.
These changelogs are already visible on the site, and I plan to summarize them twice a year, and to release the archive more fully as a public dataset.
