Every tree in San Francisco will soon be accounted for online, thanks to a new, Wikified project that aims to plot them all.

The Urban Forest Map will officially launch Wednesday, drawing on tree information collected by the city of San Francisco and Friends of the Urban Forest, a non-profit group. Though the project is getting its start in the Bay Area, the site will head to other major cities in the coming months.

"We're going to publish the most up-to-date data from our data sources. Then, from that point on, we're going to allow the community to add and edit and update that information," said Amber Bieg, the project manager of the Urban Forest Map project. "It'll become a tree census from the community and function like a Wiki."

The new website combines two trends: citizen science and local data projects. In the past several years, sites like EveryBlock and Yelp have had tremendous success collecting and presenting information about cities from the people, businesses, and governments there. Meanwhile, all kinds of citizen science projects have had success tracking birds and sorting through pictures from space.

While questions about the usefulness of citizen-acquired data dog some of the efforts, photographing and tagging the trees in your neighborhood may be a perfect application for citizen science. Conducting tree surveys is expensive for local governments, costing $3 per tree, Bieg estimates.

"If you are LA and you have 10 million trees, you're spending 30 million dollars," Bieg said. "That's bigger than the entire urban forestry budget."

Bieg got the idea for the project five years ago while she was planting trees in the famed North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco.

"I had this epiphany," Bieg said. "It was really inefficient for one individual or even a group to go out with GPS units and survey trees." Instead, the people of the community could survey their own trees.

So, she teamed up with ecologist Kelaine Vargas and had the online tools built that would allow everyday people to participate in a tree survey. "It's projected that San Francisco has hundreds of thousands of trees, and we only have 90,000 in the database," she said. "We're counting on people to help us improve that data."

Built with open-data principles in mind, all of the tree information collected will be available for city officials and developers to play with.

The better the data about trees, the easier it is to design good policies, said Kathy Wolf, a research social scientist at the National Forest Service and the University of Washington.

"Local government can introduce policy to promote urban forestry but government just does not have the resources to follow through and do the work, and that's where these citizen mapping projects are extremely helpful," Wolf said.

For example, in Seattle where Wolf works, "There are thousands of people, hundreds of organizations." But at the aggregate level, city planners and ecologists don't know if the organizations are working together or in alignment "with any ecosystem policy." New York's urban stewardship program is leading the way toward figuring out how to incorporate community data into government plans.

Bieg and Vargas said New York City could be the next place they launch the Urban Forest Map.

Image: Jon Snyder/Wired.com.

See Also:

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.**