Urban Forest Visual

Urban Forest Visual
Mark BaljakJuly 12, 2014

Did you know that 27 per cent of City of Melbourne's current tree population will be lost within the next decade? Ever had the urge to keep tabs on Melbourne's overall tree population, or even a specific tree for that matter?

Tasked with maintaining more than 70,000 trees, City of Melbourne via its Urban Forest Visual website provides the means for any person to explore the current state of Melbourne's inner city 'forest'.

In operation for some time, Urban Forest Visual is a tool within the wider Urban Forest Strategy which provides "A robust framework for the evolution and longevity of our urban forest." The strategy aims to:

  • Adapt our city to climate change.
  • Mitigate the urban heat island effect by bringing our inner city temperatures down.
  • Create healthier ecosystems.
  • Become a water sensitive city
  • Engage and involving the community.

The Urban Forest Visual interactive map goes into amazing detail, with all manner of searchable options possible. Age, location, type and life expectancy are but a few options available to the viewer, with the map able to target a specific tree if required.

Urban Forest Visual
Useful life expectancy. Image © City of Melbourne

The purpose behind Urban Forest Visual is to raise awareness of a number of key issues confronting Melbourne's tree population, particularly regarding diversity and longevity.

A lack of species diversity leaves the urban forest vulnerable to threats from pests, disease, and stress due to climate change. Currently our urban forest is dominated by eucalypts, planes, elms and gums (corymbias). Many of these trees were planted at the same time during condensed periods of planting activity, and large numbers of elms and planes are now reaching the end of their useful life expectancy.

Urban Forest Visual
Urban Forest Visual
Tree genus. Image © City of Melbourne

The above graphic shows Melbourne's most common tree types graphed by genus with the colours indicating useful lifetime; green refers to a healthy tree while orange indicated a dying specimen. Interestingly Plane and Elm trees look to be the least suited/resilient genus utilised in Melbourne.

Comment

Hats off to City of Melbourne for devising such a comprehensive and interactive system in charting the state of Melbourne's inner city 'forest.'

What chances of devising a similar program charting Melbourne's built form?

Mark Baljak

Mark Baljak was a co-founder of Urban.com.au. He passed away on Thursday 8th of November 2018 after a battle with cancer. He was 37. Mark was a keen traveller, having visited all six permanently-inhabited continents and had a love of craft beer. One of his biggest passions was observing the change that has occurred in Melbourne over the past two decades. In that time he built an enormous library of photos, all taken by him, which tracked the progress of construction on building sites from across metropolitan Melbourne.

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