Centering Trees of Oakland Cemetery

Overview

An interactive digital map and archive of the Oakland Cemetery that embodies the past, present, and future of its trees and the cultures around them.

Background

In The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing, a notable example was the history of the Japanese matsutake trees that were ravaged by pine wilt nematodes originating from America. Ecologists were able to track the progress and she discusses assemblages of living to show how everything is interconnected in the life of forests.

“Witness” Trees:

During our research, we learned more of “Champion” Trees, defined as the largest or most impressive tree of a species within its region. While this was a fascinating concept, further research and conversations with Oakland's Gardeners introduced us to “Witness” trees whose significance is defined not by their size, but by the events they've seen. In centering trees, we need to recognize that their history is inextricably affected by human activity and we wanted to focus on how trees have either thrived under human care or suffered from human neglect.

This concept became the core of the project, leading us to make the database and map interface to showcase each tree's story.

Related Works:

Based on our research and pre-existing knowledge of basic forestry and software development, we aimed to make a tool to document the past, present, and a speculative future of each tree. To do this, further inspiration from similar tools was needed.

Feral Atlas:

An inspiration for this project was Feral Atlas, an interactive encylopedia that allows users to experience ecological worlds and their entwinement with human infrastructure. The introspective nature of this project pushed the complex relations between people and nature

QueeringTheMap:

Originally we were inspired by queeringthemap.com for its ability to mark any location on a map and allow users to add their own stories to the collection of existing histories, and this became something for us to emulate in our Past/Present/Future collections because I think that it would've been nice to know when those snapshots had happened, which became the inspiration for the tree-centered stories.

Visiting Oakland

Once we decided on Oakland as our location of interest, we made our first visit to the cemetery to get a feel of the space and the trees within it. Through this, we discovered a number of unknown and familiar trees within the rural gardens of Oakland and were greatly inspired for our next steps in early development. This is where the initial ideas of sharing the stories of Oakland's Trees began.

After the initial visit, we contacted Oakland Cemetery's team, connecting with Cooper and Mary. They acted as our guides for our next tour in which we learned of the dozens of stories related to the trees of Oakland. Through this interview, we collected valuable data which inspired the inputs of our database.

Map Design Iteration:

Initial Ideation:

Early ideas which eventually lead to our developed ideas were done in FigJam in short sprints of brainstorming and sketch ups. Basic UI and stylistic decisions were made at this stage that proceeded to gain more traction in the following iterations.

Mapmaking:

I built the map on ReactJS using open source map libraries over the course of a month. Most of this time was spent researching how to implement map interactivity, which was very finicky and forced me to create another repository from scratch once. I also learned some back-end development and data props management in order to properly organize the tree's stories.

Resources used:

• MapLibre
• MapTiler
• Bootstrap
• ReactJS

Writing our stories:

From our conversation with Cooper and Mary, we worked together to:

• Review our interview
• Place pins at each tree's location
• Document the stories they've seen!

Below is a snippet of the stories we compiled into a separate database.

Final Outcomes