Its Arbor Day somewhere.

I have been, slowly, working on placing 3D trees that are in the city's urban forest/Take Root project in Google SketchUp for eventual inclusion in Google Earth. This is part of the Chattanooga 3D project. While there are scripts that can be used to mass import objects to SketchUp, I have been placing them, some 1700 trees, by hand. The initial placement on the block tiles moves pretty quickly, but some of the placement points are on top of cars, in the middle of the street, or on a building - so some fine tuning is required. The KMZ file that I am using can be downloaded for your browsing pleasure. (I finally setup a Google Doc share to hold the files and datasets that I keep saying I am going to post.) Once you download the file, just open it in Google Earth. Another piece I have been working on is a file that has the species list as well. This is where it can get fun. I was recently in San Francisco and New York, both cities are releasing data to the public, and both cities have tree loving developers that built tree apps, SF Trees and TreesNY(Near You) respectively. Both functionally and aesthetically, I prefer TreesNY, but I had much more time to play with it than I did SF Trees.

Now, to real trees. I hear that VW has been planting a lot of trees around town. Hopefully all of those are being documented by plant date, geocode, and species and that they will get added to the map. If you don't get rained out, show some arboreal love this weekend. I have some small trees that I am going to try to get in the ground with the kids. If you can't plant a real tree, I would bet volunteer virtual tree planters would be welcomed to the Chattanooga 3D project!

Oh, and here are the Chattanooga Stand results for the tree category. Go and explore.