Introduction
Green space is an essential part of a healthy urban landscape. The mental and physical well being of citizens is greatly affected by the quality and quantity of urban green spaces. Without greenery, urban environments exacerbate the heat island effect and create a negative feedback loop for energy consumption and dangerous living conditions. There is also a growing body of evidence towards the mental health impact of being too far removed from nature, with a “nature prescription” becoming a more common phrase.
Given New York’s status as The Concrete Jungle (where dreams are made of), I wanted to research how much greenery is available to New Yorkers. I browsed through the NYC Open Data Environment category and decided to work with the GreenThumb Community Garden’s dataset because it’s a project that I didn’t know about.
Datasets
I used two datasets to visualize community gardens in NYC. First I used the GreenThumb Garden Info dataset to map the projects. I combined it with the GreenThumb Site Visits data to pull detailed information about gardens. The combined datasets provide a comprehensive view of community gardens in NYC and complement each other by providing both geographic and contextual information that neither one has entirely by itself.
Methodology
I built an interactive webmap using Mapboxgl JS and vanilla HTML, CSS and Javascript. I bootstrapped the app with an open source template library I had previously created for work. I centered the map on Manhattan by looking up it’s lat/lng center coordinates. Data for the gardens was fetched via API calls, with the parksid field acting as the join between the Site Visits and Garden Info datasets.
I started by plotting the community gardens as fills because they are stored as polygons. At a certain zoom level, this created a really nice visualization because it gives a clear sense of where the garden is, how big it is and what shape it’s in. I color coded each park according to it’s entry in the Garden Info dataset – green for Active GreenThumb sites, blue for non-compliant GreenThumb sites, and black for unclassified sites.
However, because the community gardens are small the initial render of the map did not provide a useful visualization when zoomed out. To fix this, I created a layer of circles that could stand in for the parks and adjust their size based on zoom level. By default, the map shows a scattering of dots that represent the community gardens. Zoom in and the dots shrink until they disappear and are replaced by the fills for the map.
In order to create more contrast, I changed the base map to Mapbox’s “light” style. Washing out the details of the map helped both de-emphasize the urban environment and make it easier to identify the gardens.
The next step was to integrate the Site Visits data set. I did this by getting the parksid from the click event on the Garden Info layer, and passing that to the API endpoint for the Site Visits dataset. The response contained useful information that I visualized in a popup.
Outcomes and Next Steps
The interactive web map is currently deployed here.
I am interested in greatly expanding the scope of this project by including more NYC Open Datasets related to greenery. My goal is to create a comprehensive, interactive web map of all the different forms of greenery in the city.
As I continue to work on this, I also want to reconsider how I’m visualizing the text data. The popups currently show a list that somewhat translate the response fields, but they could be a lot more useful. For example, I could translate the response data into conditional sentences that create an accessible, human friendly narrative. Interactive elements like map filters and hover effects will also be important to consider as I expand the scope of this project.
Overall, I really enjoyed making this web map. I enjoy visualizing geographic data sets and have experience building interactive web maps. The NYC Open Data portal has good technical documentation that makes it easy to access the data.
References
“GreenThumb Garden Info | NYC Open Data.” Accessed April 11, 2023. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/dataset/GreenThumb-Garden-Info/p78i-pat6.
“GreenThumb Site Visits | NYC Open Data.” Accessed April 11, 2023. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Environment/GreenThumb-Site-Visits/xqbk-beh5.
Kondo, Michelle C., Kehinde O. Oyekanmi, Allison Gibson, Eugenia C. South, Jason Bocarro, and J. Aaron Hipp. “Nature Prescriptions for Health: A Review of Evidence and Research Opportunities.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 12 (June 2020): 4213. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17124213.
US EPA, OAR. “Learn About Heat Islands.” Overviews and Factsheets, June 17, 2014. https://www.epa.gov/heatislands/learn-about-heat-islands.
Ziluo Huang, Jiaying Dong, Ziru Chen, Yujie Zhao, Shanjun Huang, Weizhen Xu, Dulai Zheng, Peilin Huang, and Weicong Fu. “Spatiotemporal Characteristics of Public Recreational Activity in Urban Green Space under Summer Heat.” Forests 13, no. 8 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3390/f13081268.