Berlin has more than 900,000 street and park trees, and an open-source map now lets residents look after them one by one. The Guardian reports that the project, called Gieß den Kiez (“water the neighbourhood”), has signed up 12,000 volunteers since it launched in 2020.
The map, built by the public innovation team at CityLAB Berlin, works out how much water each tree needs from its species, its age and recent rainfall. Trees in trouble are colour-coded, and anyone can see when a tree was last watered, log their own bucketful or adopt a tree on their street. During a heatwave in late June, volunteers recorded 8,000 litres in a single day.
One volunteer, Amanda Gläser-Bligh, told the paper it feels “very fun, almost like a video game”.
Because the code is free to reuse, the idea is spreading. Potsdam, Leipzig and Magdeburg run their own versions, as does a district of Paris, and project lead Anna Mehrländer says any city with tree data can do the same.
Source: The Guardian