NATIVE TREES OF AUSTIN
Image source: austintexas.gov
Which are the native trees in Austin? And where can one find them?
The aim of this project was to create a map of all the registered native trees in Austin. I wanted the bubble diameters to represent the size of the trees. I wanted a simple web-app interface with tooltip functionality that would allow the user to locate and identify the native trees in their neighborhood parks.
The first map I created uses the built-in Power BI map visual. It includes a tooltip I created that reveals a scientific drawing by artist Robert O'Brien and general appearance information from the Notes table.
*In some instances the art was not present and the secondary source, a Texas A&M University unsecured website, will not load in Power BI.
The second map uses ArcGIS for Power BI. Functionality prevents the enhanced tooltip I created for the first map, but allows the inclusion of a hyperlink to the image URL. The trade-off for this is the ability to layer additional geospatial data from the vast sources within the ArcGIS database network.
*Visual may not appear due to limitations of ArcGIS account public permissions.
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The tools used to cleanse and connect the data to create the visualization.
When researching the answer to this question, I stumbled upon this Native Tree Growing Guide for Central Texas. It contained a nice table of the trees I needed to find.
Native_Central_Texas_Trees.pdfI converted the PDF to an Excel spreadsheet using Adobe Acrobat, proceeded to clean and organize the resulting pages through Power Query, and loaded the clean table to Power BI.
Eventually I found myself on the City of Austin government website, which, after some scouring, revealed a robust database of over 60,000 trees monitored by the City of Austin.
The site also contained a map of the geolocations of each tree. The map loaded slowly, and I was determined to recreate it using only the native trees in the table of the Native Tree Growing Guide for Central Texas.
I located the dataset I needed and loaded it directly into Power BI through a web data connection.
Then I merged the online data set with the Trees List data set in Power Query to create a new data set Geo Native Trees. After some transformations and tidying, I realized I needed to create a table of images.
I appreciated the artistry in the Native Tree Growing Guide for Central Texas, so I located all the source URLs for the beautiful work done by Robert O'Brien, and added them to a new column in the Notes table of the Excel file for later use in the tooltip.
I linked the appropriate keys for each table to the Geo Native Trees table, using a star schema, and proceeded to create the visualization.
*Austin Trees is the source dataset from the city website. Since it was merged with the original dataset from the PDF extraction, it did not need to be loaded to the model. I chose its inclusion here for illustrative purposes and future use in visuals.
Native Trees of Austin
*This is a mobile friendly version.
**Desktop/Laptop version below.