So the NYC Street Tree Map is now available on-line and it looks amazing. Excitedly, I went to my corner of Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
Uh-oh. The trees right outside my window are Hackberries (Celtis), but they’re both mapped as Hawthorns (Crataegus). 
Leaves. 
The really distinctive bark.
It so happened that I passed a pair of Hawthorns on the way to the subway after noting these errors. So, for comparison:
Street-tree Crataegus. 
And the haws of its neighbor, another of the rather varied Hawthorn genus.
But guess what? These Hawthorns were mapped as Mulberries (Morus). (Reeling.) Oy!
You know, when I saw the NYC official tree census vehicle in the neighborhood, I was struck by the fact that it had New Jersey plates. What the hell? And the corresponding pictures on the map are of winter trees, leafless — which makes for a real ID challenge in many cases.
Citizen science projects are much touted, but they generally boil down to somebody doing the grunt work of data-collecting. Having amateurs, however well-meaning, do this kind of work has its hazards. This amateur, however, has gone in and submitted corrections for these errors, but how many others are there? I found two more on the next block: two oaks are mapped as Redbuds! (Need to study further before figuring out what kind of oaks). The Ents would not be amused. I wonder how many other misidentifications there are amid the 685,781 mapped trees?
Backyard and Beyond 
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