One day you are all happy and relaxed, with plenty of time for cooking dinner of any kind. Three course dinner? No problem! Then, one day, just around the corner comes the start of semester. It is a bit like when one is distracted at the beach, waving hello to a friend or loved one and a sneaky wave tackles us and runs us over without any consideration.

On the plus side, I am usually looking for links that could be interesting to first year forestry students. Some times they are about forestry related news, but others are nice implementations of data visualizations that tell an interesting story. That’s when I came across this interesting clustering of New York City neighbourhoods grouped by similarity of proportions of street-tree species, done by Kieran Healy.

Of course one thing leads to the next until I got to this great New York City Tree Map in which one can get information for nearly 3/4 of a million individual trees. Enough to motivate some students. Zoom in until finding a tree you like.

Neighbourhood clustering by tree species