Belfast trees

Updated links, Jan 2023

I was poking around the Open Data NI website this evening when I stumbled across the Belfast trees dataset. The dataset provides a location for each of 37,557 trees in the city (as of November 2015) plus its species, health and diameter. There’s a nice tree map here but I thought I might practice my R mapping skills for a bit of fun. Where are Belfast’s most unusual trees?

First off, there are 53 different species of tree on the list, of which the six most frequent are:

Species	Trees
Lime	6370
Maple	5423
Ash	2346
Oak	2259
Pine	2178
Cherry	1690

The bottom of the list is just as interesting. Our six least common trees are:

Species	Trees
Magnolia	5
Plum	4
Tree Of Heaven	4
Liquidamber	2
Handkerchief	1
Rauli	1

What is a ‘Handkerchief Tree’? Rather lovely it turns out. Where is Belfast’s sole handkerchief tree? Turns out it’s in the Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park (red icon below). (The sole Rauli tree is in Belfast Zoo).

Belfast’s thickest tree (by trunk diameter) is in Belfast City Cemetery on the Falls Road and its tallest tree is in Cherryvale park, off the Ravenhill road. See the orange icons in the map below.

Finally, out of curiosity, where are Belfast’s sickest street trees? That is, as opposed to trees in parks. The map below contains street trees that are classed as low vigour and are either classed as being in poor condition or very poor condition or dying:

523 street trees in Belfast meet both these conditions. While street trees are clustered in general there do seem to be some streets with a lot of sick trees. Illness clusters too I imagine. In terms of species, we should perhaps worry about Belfast’s few Hawthorn bushes, but I can’t see a good pattern. A bit more digging might help (or not)…

Species	Total	Healthy	Sick	Sick %
Hawthorn	25	20	5	20
Chestnut	85	75	10	11
Poplar	38	34	4	10
Rowan	416	377	39	9
Apple	12	11	1	8
Beech	32	30	2	6
Crab Apple	37	35	2	5
Lime	5025	4739	286	5
Hazel	414	395	19	4
Maple	1083	1036	47	4
Cherry	818	791	27	3
Hornbeam	789	764	25	3
Oak	159	154	5	3
Ash	167	163	4	2
Birch	183	178	5	2

Gist with code here

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@online{o'kelly2018,
  author = {O’Kelly, Ciarán},
  title = {Belfast Trees},
  date = {2018-03-07},
  url = {https://ciaranokelly.org/posts/2018-03-07-belfast-trees.html},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

O’Kelly, Ciarán. 2018. “Belfast Trees.” March 7, 2018. https://ciaranokelly.org/posts/2018-03-07-belfast-trees.html.