Project Goals--To show the number of trees and the energy savings associated with trees.
and to show the number of trees that need to be planted to offset ½ of the energy costs associated with the proposed Marin City Center.
This map is to show the number of trees in the neighborhoods and the energy savings based an average cost of $4.39 per tree.
This map shows the Proposed Marin City Center.
Overall I thought this was a fun project and has a number of real world applications. It would seem that many municipalities will be undertaking studies like this to determine if the cost of mapping, planting and maintenance are beneficial to the city. As can be seen, an energy savings is only one of the benefits. Other benefits include: stormwater management, help with soil erosion, carbon storage and sequestration and an increase in property values.
Calculating the energy costs and the number of trees that needed to be planted for the proposed Marin City Center had a few challenges, as there was limited information on the building sizes or number of building proposed. I made a "crude" count of the buildings for my calculations and ultimately ended with around 1,200 trees that needed to be planted to offset ½ of the energy costs for the proposed City Center.
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