Wild foraging

craft
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:deciduous_tree::maple_leaf: Time to tap trees for sap in Minnesota! Just this week I saw two instances in the Twin Cities, all set up ready for the temps and trees to conspire:

ā€”At Fort Snelling, a number of trees are tapped near the Visitorā€™s Center. Nice plastic buckets were labeled ā€œMaple Onlyā€. Obviously an official Park project.

ā€”Walking along the Mississippi river-flat trails, saw a single tree tapped, going into a re-used gallon plastic jug. Iā€™m not sure what kind of treeā€”my friend thought it was an ash. It seemed like it was a ā€œforagingā€ activity. I hope it gets left in place :slight_smile:

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We used to tap one ash tree, right out front of the property near the road, just to keep the neighbors guessing.

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i have an insane idea. tell me not to do it.

map every tree, shrub, grass, cactus in existence. why do this? why not!

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Are you now independently wealthy with no need to make money, sleep, eat or bathe? because unless you can give all that up, itā€™s a losing proposition, friend. I canā€™t even manage to get that done on my own property!

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Google Forest. Just wait.

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OK, Iā€™m not saying it wouldnā€™t be great to have. Just Fucking Insane to DO.

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Let me know when you get to the plains states. (And thanks for the punchline next time Iā€™m hanging out with some of the grasslands ecology folk from the university.)

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Oh, I agree on the insanity. That is why I am saying Google will do it. :wink:

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hear me out.

satellite data and hadoop clusters. looooots of them. i really donā€™t know if itā€™s possible, but i do know i can spot an ash from a maple from a cherry on google maps. so why canā€™t i train a model to do it for me, or at least say ā€œthere are 115,458 unique types of trees on earthā€ based on satellite images?

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What about the trees that live below the highest canopy?

Thereā€™s layers, even in American deciduous forests.

I would think thatā€™s the biggest issue.

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Theā€¦ Larch!!!
(I love that sketch)

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Mechanical Turk. Hire people to go out and look.

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Argh. Out of likes. :heart:

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i have seriously been contemplating that idea. iā€™ve had great results with Turk (iā€™ve used over 600 turkers at last count) and largely been a great success.

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I think youā€™ll be able to get a good coarse overview of areas if you stick to large objects like trees.

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When I move out of my apartment, I intend to leave it impeccably clean and in good repair.

But now I also intend to leave one of these with a few unidentifiable objects inside.

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Sir, you are ambitious. If you can actually do it, it would be amazing. Impressive and a benefit to humanity.

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Maybe not all trees in existence, but Iā€™ve heard that the City of Minneapolis has a map with every tree in the city.

Iā€™m not sure if this is it or not (because, what Iā€™ve heard about, or think Iā€™ve heard about, may not be published) but here is an interactive map of the ā€œMinneapolis Urban Tree Canopyā€

And here is an article about someone who mapped the trees in Central Park, NYC. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/31/very-important-trees

In December, they published their map. Itā€™s five feet tall. It has nineteen thousand six hundred and thirty trees on it, about eighty per cent of the Parkā€™s estimated twenty-four thousand trees, all of them identifiable according to a leaf-shape key.

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My friend actually built an app for that, for forestry and conservation. You take your ipad out there and start catalogging away before the actual logging. [forestmetrix.com](http://forestmetrix.com)

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