TREES OF UNIVERSITY OF THE PACIFIC
DATA ANALYSIS
GIS/ESI TORCH INSTITUTE
July 1998
A Woodrow Wilson Institute
Developed by:
Don Bockler  Bob Culler  Joe Zaiman
 

THE STORYLINE:

A sense of place provides the foundation of environmental education.  This  creates an awareness of the physical and biological resources which hopefully instills a desire to protect and conserve these resources.  Our project seeks to establish a sense of place by identifying several of the existing  members of the biological community of the UOP campus. The value of this project is to use this GIS model to enable people to create a similar sense of place within their own community.

Many trees of California are exotics, while a few claim to be native.  After a few years the exotics become natives, increasing in girth and cover as they take up more and more of their share of resources.  We wanted to relate this idea to the trees on the campus of the University of the Pacific.  We identified several native and non-native trees around campus and recorded several physical characteristics.

Important Questions for Further Study:
1.  Where do you live?
2.  Why are you there?
3.  How did you get there?
4.  Do non-native trees use more of the resources than the native trees?
Objectives:
1.  Use GIS (Geographic Information System) to produce a map for the location of selected trees and their physical attributes on a school campus.  A hidden database enables students to investigate general relationships of dbh (diameter at breast height) with tree height and/or canopy cover for different tree types.  Differences include native versus non-native trees, angiosperm versus gymnosperm, canopy cover and height of the tree.
2.  From the modeling of real data in a specific area one can learn more about their own the sense of place.

Procedure and Resources:
1.  Resources:  Aerial photo of Stockton, CA (from Landsat), campus map, CAD drawing of the campus from the Buildings and Grounds Department, National Audubon Society Pocket Guide Trees of North America, Field Guide to North American Trees,  Digital camera Sony Mavica model #MVC-FD7, Professor Dale McNeal of the Biology Department UOP, Netscape Communicator, ArcView (by ESRI) Paint Shop Pro.

2.  Collect the resources.
3.  Scanned the maps and several pictures of trees.
4.  Identified trees and their location and measured dbh, height and canopy cover.
5.  Photographed individual trees.
6.  Compiled the information within ArcView.
7.  Displayed the data on the Internet.

Results:
This is the tree study site found on the Northeastern corner of the UOP campus.

 
 


 

Tree data was collected on the campus and entered into a data table.  This was then linked to the geographic locations of the trees.  Data can be sorted and displayed and further analyzed through ArcView, by any of the features on the table.  For example, compare the dbh with the canopy cover.

(Scroll over to the right for the complete data table.) 

 
Displayed below is an example of the Hot Link feature of ArcView.  Scroll to the right to find the location of the Sequoia highlighted in yellow.  When you click on this point in ArcView, (with the hot link feature) a picture of the tree appears in the view. Then if you activate the Information Feature of ArcView and again click on the tree, the tree data appears in a table form.
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