pdxTrees

pdxTrees is a data package composed of information on inventoried trees in Portland, OR. There are two datasets that can be accessed with this package:

• get_pdxTrees_parks() pulls in data on up to 25,534 trees from 174 Portland parks.

• get_pdxTrees_streets() pulls in data on up to 218,602 trees located on Portland’s streets. A street tree is loosely defined as a tree generally in the public right-of-way, usually between the sidewalk and the street.

The street trees are categorized by one of the 96 Portland neighborhoods and the park trees are categorized by the public parks in which they grow.

These data were collected by the Portland Parks and Recreation’s Urban Forestry Tree Inventory Project. The Tree Inventory Project has gathered data on Portland trees since 2010, collecting this data in the summer months with a team of over 1,300 volunteers and city employees. The streets trees were inventoried from 2010 to 2016, and the park trees were inventoried from 2017 to 2019. More information on the data can be found here.

To install the package

# Do the following once
# install.packages("devtools")

# Then install the package
devtools::install_github("mcconvil/pdxTrees")

Update/Getting the data

pdxTrees was updated in July of 2020 to contain two data loading functions, get_pdxTrees_parks() and get_pdxTrees_streets(), to pull the park and street tree data, respectively, from the Github repository.

# Load the library
library(pdxTrees)

# To get data on all parks 

pdxTrees_parks <- get_pdxTrees_parks()

# To get data on one park 

berkeley_park <- get_pdxTrees_parks(park = "Berkeley Park")

# To get data on multiple parks 

parks <- get_pdxTrees_parks(park = c("Berkeley Park", 
                                     "East Delta Park"))


# The streets function works the same way but with neighborhoods! 

pdxTrees_streets <- get_pdxTrees_streets()

# One neighborhood 
  
concordia <- get_pdxTrees_streets(neighborhood = "Concordia")
  
# Mutliple neighborhoods! 
  
neighborhoods <- get_pdxTrees_streets(neighborhood = c("Concordia",
                                                       "Eastmoreland",
                                                       "Sunnyside"))

Teaching with pdxTrees

pdxTrees is used in multiple Reed College statistics courses as a tool to help students develop their data analysis skills in RStudio. In Introduction to Probability and Statistics, students wrangle pdxTrees data with dplyr, and create graphs of pdxTrees with ggplot2. In the Data Science course, the package is used to teach best practices of function writing, to construct interactive maps with leaflet, and to showcase the usefulness of lubridate, along with many other R packages.