Project Detail
Montreal Urban Forest Map
A spatial research project measuring canopy health, biodiversity, and equity across Montreal. Built to translate ecological data into decisions for planners, researchers, and residents.
Key metrics
Problem
Urban canopy data is fragmented across sources, making it hard to reason about equity and ecosystem health.
Montreal's tree inventory spans multiple datasets, formats, and update cycles. This project consolidates them to surface neighborhood-level insights and highlight where canopy health is resilient or vulnerable.
Data
A harmonized dataset built from municipal inventories and ecological surveys.
Sources
- • City of Montreal tree inventory
- • Open canopy coverage surveys
- • Borough-level environmental reports
- • Species biodiversity indices
Each source is normalized into a consistent schema, geocoded, and enriched with ecological attributes. Quality checks flag duplicates, missing species labels, and coordinate anomalies.
Method
Spatial joins, clustering, and biodiversity metrics build a neighborhood-scale picture.
Ingest + Clean
Normalize raw inventories and validate coordinates, species, and canopy tags.
Enrich + Analyze
Compute canopy density, biodiversity indices, and species balance by grid.
Publish + Iterate
Serve outputs to the map and document methodology for reuse.
Results
Outputs that translate data into action for planning, conservation, and research.
Neighborhood equity
Highlight boroughs with lower canopy coverage relative to population density.
Biodiversity resilience
Surface neighborhoods with low species diversity and target planting opportunities.
Next
Upcoming work to expand metrics and pipeline automation.
Next iterations will deepen the data pipeline and add metric dashboards to track canopy health over time. This includes automated data refreshes, validation tooling, and open methodology reporting.