Trees!

You know things about your community that not everyone knows, and a map can help you share that information with other people. A map can also help you learn about other communities by showing you information about many different places.

Look around outside. Do you see any trees? Where? How many, and how big? Trees are different based on where you are, and they help your community and the environment. So let's map trees and collect information about them to see how they look around the world.

To start, add a tree in your community to our map. Just fill out the survey below!

Here we map trees - but anything, anywhere can be mapped.

If you don't want to fill out the survey in this page, you can scan the QR code to the right to open the survey on a different device and fill it out there.

After you fill it out, come back here to see your data on the map.

It takes a couple of minutes, but the tree you just added will appear on this map just like the trees other people around the world have added. Do you see yours? How many do you see near you?

Click on the dots to see information about the trees.

What do the dot colors mean? What about the sizes of the dots? Hint: Check out the map's legend! Use the button in the lower left corner of the map to open it.

The map is a great way to see how the trees are spread out on Earth. But how many trees are on our map? How many are coniferous? Those questions are harder to answer with a map, so let's put our map into a dashboard and get some more info out of it. Tip: Our tree study uses a GIS (geographic information system). It has an interactive, digital map! So interact with the dashboard. Click on things. Move the map. Explore!

What happens to the lists, graphs, and average height as you zoom in on your community?

Compared to the rest of the world, does your community have taller trees, or shorter?

If you were to collect this data again, what additional piece of information would you want about the trees?

This is just a peek into what you can do. But a GIS is all about gathering data and working with it and understanding it based on its location and the data around it. What will you map next? What pattern do you want to explore, or what question do you want to answer? What data do you need to solve it? What are you waiting for?