Do you love trees as much as you love maps and data? Then do we have a Map Chat for you! On Wednesday, March 4 at 2 p.m. Central time, join us via Zoom or meet us in the Cartography Lab in Science Hall (room 250).
Urban tree inventories are typically used as technical tools for assessing present-day risk, condition, and ecosystem services. In this Map Chat, Dr. Anna Bierbrauer proposes reading these datasets differently—by treating existing urban trees as material evidence of past planning and design decisions. She introduces the Urban Tree Archive, a mapping method that combines ecological growth rates and backcasting to estimate when trees were established, effectively transforming contemporary tree inventories into a living archive.
Using Denver, Colorado as a case study, the talk offers a partial overview of the method, demonstrating how geospatial analysis can be paired with municipal and professional archives to interpret urban landscapes over time. By shifting attention from why trees fail to why certain trees persist, the Urban Tree Archive foregrounds how long-term institutional priorities and design practices become embedded in—and obscured by—the everyday urban landscape.
About Anna
Anna Bierbrauer is an assistant professor of Landscape Architecture in the UW–Madison Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture. Her research combines political ecology, environmental history, critical physical geography, and geospatial data into the landscape architecture and planning professions to understand current and historical equity issues related to urban vegetation. She received her Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Minnesota and her PhD in Geography, Planning, and Design from University of Colorado – Denver.