Brought to you by...
Street Nature Score is brought to you by sustainable design strategist and educator Jeremy Faludi, of Faludi Design. He believes strongly in making sustainability fun and beautiful. Today, the most sustainable parts of cities--densely populated, walkable areas--are mostly concrete and steel, while suburbs feel green, even though they're not very sustainable. By measuring urban nature, and making its benefits clear, we can help individuals, realtors, developers, and planners make cities more sustainable while also making them nicer places to live.
Data for Seattle is provided by Davey Resource Group, experts in urban nature care and geographic information systems. Data for San Francisco is provided by Robert Pedersen of RPGeospatial.
How are nature scores calculated?
Aerial images from the USDA with 1m x 1m accuracy are analyzed by algorithms to generate pixels of 30m x 30m. The score for each pixel is simply the percentage of nature as opposed to hardscape. Hardscape includes buildings, pavement, and other artificial surfaces. Nature includes any kind of trees, grass, shrubs, etc., even bare dirt and bodies of water. (However, only limited extents of water are included, to avoid skewingneighborhood & city scores.)
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The Street Nature Score is the average of all data pixels within a 100m (.06 mi) radius, roughly the length of a typical short city block. The Neighborhood Nature Score is the average of data within a 1.5km (1 mi) radius, it is not measured by the legal or cultural boundaries of neighborhoods. The City Nature Score is the average of data within an 8 km (5 mi) radius, it is also not measured by legal or cultural boundaries of cities.
You can contribute
This is currently a prototype. If you'd like to help by contributing funds, contributing your GIS or programming skills, or by getting the word out to others who could help with those, we'd be delighted to hear from you! You can email StreetNatureScore@gmai.com. Even amateurs can contribute by performing your own measurements.