STAND

NYC's Street Trees, Grown From the Census — one branching structure per real tree record.

A single-file Three.js piece that grows a procedural forest from NYC's 2005 and 2015 Street Tree Censuses, fetched live from NYC Open Data. Species, trunk diameter, health, and location all come from the real record; only the branch shape itself is procedurally grown (seeded per tree, so the same record always grows the same shape).

Built by Joe.K · axisbim.io

Files

• index.html — the whole app. Three.js (r128, via cdnjs), no build step, no dependencies to install.
• audit_deploy.js — local pre-ship QA gate, 309 checks as of v1.16.24. Run node audit_deploy.js before every deploy; it exits 1 on any failure. Committed here (not the usual convention across Joe's other tools, which keep this local-only) so a future session — mine or anyone's — has the full regression history and can verify a change without rebuilding the checks from scratch.
• netlify.toml — publish config, security headers, no-cache on index.html so version bumps are never served stale.

Deploy

Same workflow as the rest of the tool suite — GitHub's web UI, no git CLI, flat repo:

1. Open this repo.
2. Add file → Upload files, drag in the updated index.html / audit_deploy.js (and this README.md if it changed too). Commit directly to main.
3. Netlify is already connected (nycstreettrees.netlify.app) and auto-redeploys on every push to main — no separate Netlify step needed for routine updates.

Before every push: node audit_deploy.js locally, confirm it's clean.

Data sources

• Tree records: 2015 Street Tree Census and 2005 Street Tree Census, NYC Open Data (SODA API, live-fetched, not bundled). A third census (1995) exists on the same portal but isn't wired up yet — see the in-file changelog (v1.16.0) for why.
• Borough boundaries: NYC Open Data, live-fetched.
• Context landmasses (New Jersey / Westchester / Long Island): real administrative boundaries via OSM Overpass, with a Census county-file fallback if that fetch fails. This was a rocky one — the in-file changelog documents several false starts (v1.15.6–v1.15.8 tried and rolled back OSM data blind, with no way to verify from that sandbox at the time; v1.16.4 got it working for real once live browser verification became available). Worth reading the changelog directly if picking this back up, rather than assuming any single version's summary tells the whole story.
• Hudson River and Long Island Sound water shapes: real hydrology data from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset (hydro.nationalmap.gov), not administrative boundaries standing in for coastline — the honest gap flagged in earlier versions of this doc is closed. This took many rounds (v1.16.5 through v1.16.18) to get right; the in-file changelog has the full history, including a regression along the way (v1.16.11 briefly broke all five boroughs' land fill via a function-naming collision, fixed in v1.16.12) and a final resilience fix (v1.16.18) after the live USGS API turned out to intermittently fail CORS in ways that varied by browser — both water shapes are now baked into the file as a permanent fallback and no longer depend on that fetch succeeding even once.
• Everywhere else inside the visible frame that no county data is fetched for (Rockland/Putnam/ Orange NY, Fairfield CT) is filled with a plain land-colored backdrop (v1.16.16) rather than showing as open water — not real boundary data, just enough to avoid an obviously-wrong gap.

Version

Current: v1.16.24. Full changelog lives at the top of index.html — every version bump, including UI-only changes, is logged there with root cause and what was verified. For the water/ coastline work specifically, the changelog entries from v1.16.5 onward are the most useful single source if you're trying to understand what's real data vs. approximation and why.

Recent (v1.16.19–v1.16.24), briefly — see index.html's changelog for full detail on each:

• v1.16.19–v1.16.22: a multi-round NJ/Westchester/Long Island coverage saga. A client-side timeout fix (v1.16.19), a missing-counties fix to the Overpass query (v1.16.20), a fix to where those counties were inserted in the query — Overpass silently drops relation clauses inserted mid-union, a real server-side quirk (v1.16.21) — and finally a stale localStorage cache that was masking the already-correct v1.16.21 fix for any returning visitor (v1.16.22). If you're touching buildOsmAdminQuery/NJ_OSM_COUNTIES again: append new clauses at the end of the query, and bump OSM_CONTEXT_CACHE_KEY in the same edit.
• v1.16.23: the Hudson/Sound water overlays were filled with a flat guessed color instead of the base ocean plane's real gradient texture, producing two visibly different blues. Fixed by sharing the same texture with correctly computed world-space UVs.
• v1.16.24: performance — switching Canopy Color mode froze the tab for 4–5s (full branch-geometry regeneration for a color-only change). Added a fast path that updates just the color attributes in place; confirmed live at ~35–45x faster with byte-identical output.