TreeTalk – Walking with Trees
By Nataliia Starikova, with love
Although the Urban Tree Festival of 2020 has finished, it left all of us with plenty of amazing activities to do during lockdown. Live events are over now, but you know that you can always go to the UTF website and enjoy a variety of things you didn’t have the time to experience during the festival. One of those things is an app called TreeTalk, which lets you create your own tree trails around London. I have to say I was not that person who didn’t have the time; I was that person who had to go back to where they came from when COVID-19 spread around the globe. I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t be extremely excited to try it when I get back to London. Which is why I decided to interview one of the creators of TreeTalk – Rob Tustain. In this interview Rob talks about the inspiration behind the app, how it has grown since lockdown and his goals for the future.
NS: Could you tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do?
RT: TreeTalk London was created by Revolution Consultancy & Design, a data visualisation company specialising in active travel projects influencing greater health and wellbeing for clients and end-users. It is a collaboration of 3 people, Steve Pocock, Paul Wood and Rob Tustain. Together we bring our combined skills that cover technical and data delivery, tree expertise and public presentation and marketing/partnerships to allow TreeTalk to grow.
Steve is an environmental technologist who splits his time between developing projects with Revolution, being Community Campaign Coordinator for the London National Park City movement, and as a trustee for the urban farm social enterprise , Cultivate London.
Paul is a tree expert and author of two books, ‘London’s Street Trees’, and ‘London is a Forest’. He divides his time between writing and providing arboreal consultancy services working with organisations focused on improving the public realm.
Rob is a business analyst with a marketing background who has previously worked for The Law Society (England and Wales) and Publicis Chemistry. When he’s not devising technology solutions for Revolution’s clients, he likes to cycle and walk round the remarkably green city of London.
NS: How did TreeTalk begin and what was your inspiration?
RT: Our TreeTalk journey began in central London in 2017. We were walking and taking short cuts down side streets, and the trees were all in bloom. As we were passing them, we were wondering what types of trees they were. Suddenly Paul, who is a font of knowledge about London street trees, was able to tell us about all the trees in a really engaging and interesting way, and brought it to life for us.
Steve who is passionate about technology, thought why don’t we get the tree data and visualise it on a map. At the time, the GLA had also released a version of tree data from London boroughs, and the rest is history. TreeTalk was born.
NS: What was an initial response to the app and how has it changed since the lockdown?
RT: Pre-lockdown, TreeTalk was known through some of the tree community and organisations, but relatively unknown by the general public. Suddenly, with the Covid-19 restrictions, people found themselves restricted to their one daily walk, and started to notice the environment around them far more closely. Suddenly, TreeTalk became much more relevant in people’s lives, especially in Greater London, where we map over 700,000 trees across nearly all boroughs.
NS: How do you gather information about so many trees in London and how do you know the exact species?
RT: Our London dataset comes from the GLA, which collected tree data from various boroughs. There are some boroughs that we don’t currently have in our map and we are actively trying to get this information supplied. The initial tree species identification was provided by each borough, however the challenge was to match the data correctly, e.g. some boroughs named trees slightly different than the same tree in another borough. We undertook an arduous process to ‘clean’ this data so that it could be standardised and compared across all boroughs.
This process is still on-going and one day we hope that we can help to create a standard species directory that can be adopted by all boroughs/councils; which would make the data more productive, for more people and organisations.
NS: What do you think is your biggest strength and what do people enjoy most about the app?
RT: Our biggest strength is to be able to take people on a journey of discovery and from that enable them to contribute. From their front-door, people can generate a tree trail that takes them around their local area, or from one point to another (‘A to B’). We feel that the strength of standardising and refining the data, together with our on-going routing technology really helps to make TreeTalk relevant and to bring it alive.
NS: What are your plans for the future and are you planning to make any changes?
We are always evolving. We have come a long way since TreeTalk was launched in 2017. This has given us time to refine our routing engine, increase our engagement with users, and we have been able to apply this across other projects such as GoParksLondon , where we have created a 4,000 site green space resource for Londoners, through to London Car Free Day; allowing us to incorporate event functionality to our routing offering.
What is exciting for us are the current Mayor of London’s Streetspace plans aiming to place clean, green and sustainable travel at the heart of London’s recovery from Covid-19 and also the Climate Emergency plans, where many areas are aiming to be carbon neutral by 2030 whilst dramatically expanding their tree planting and co-design and co-creation with their residents. We believe that we have the technology and environmental background to be relevant. In terms of TreeTalk, imagine if a Londoner could walk or cycle from their doorstep to their place of work in central London, experiencing and enjoying the huge variety of urban nature on their way. We think our own journey is only now beginning!
A big thank you to Rob for participating in the Urban Tree Festival and answering these questions in so much depth. TreeTalk is a reminder of how such a routine thing as a walk becomes valuable in times of uncertainty. It is a reminder that nature brings us together, heals us together, and connects us together, even when we are alone. If you are up for a walk with trees, visit the TreeTalk #DailyWalk Generator.