This dashboard aims to provide New Yorkers insight into current forestry work across the city and within the boroughs, in the hopes of further promoting civic engagement with NYC’s 311 system. A large portion of municipal government services are allocated in reaction to resident crowdsourcing, in which people report problems that they encounter; the New York City 311 system received 2.7 million complaints in 2021. These reports are used to make both immediate decisions—such as which dangerous, downed trees to inspect and fix—and longer-term planning decisions, such as which streets to resurface. While such reporting systems have gained popularity in the last few decades, there is concern that (a) the public doesn’t homogeneously use the system, i.e., some neighborhoods under-report and others exaggerate their incidents; and (b) that municipal agencies are not equitably responsive to complaints from different neighborhoods.

This research develops computational methods to accomplish three goals:

We are working with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (NYCDPR) to validate and deploy insights from our methods. This research uses publicly available data from NYCDPR, which you can find on the NYC Open Data Portal: