Team: Ashley Wang, Jingxian Zhang, Sam Resnick, Lawrence Sun
The data say that there is a high number of ginkgo trees in New York. This number has only increased throughout the years, even outpacing the average rate of increase. We want to tell this story to find out why people would continue planting these stinky trees, and what makes them so popular.
We started by looking at the NYC tree census data and were overwhelmed with tens of millions of data points. However, after scrolling through the data, one particular tree caught our eye. This was the Ginkgo tree! Most of us had smelled this particular tree and were disgusted by it and wondered why this tree was so prevalent in NYC. After looking at the tree census data over two decades, we noticed that the number of trees in NYC were increasing by a certain percentage, but the number of Ginkgo trees increased at a greater rate. This piqued our curiosity. After researching the Ginkgo tree, we learned that it is an ancient and hearty tree with a rich history and is extremely popular in Asian cultures for cooking and medicinal use. With this knowledge, we looked for data on the increase in Asian population in NYC to see if there was a correlation. By graphing the increase in Ginkgo trees in each city borough and overlaying the increase in Asian population in each borough, we saw a trend: boroughs with a large percent increase in Asian population also saw a large increase in Ginkgo trees. Although this does not necessarily indicate causation, we did learn that there is a well known “scavenger economy” in NYC amongst Asian communities where people pick and gather Ginkgo fruit. This increase in demand for the fruit could have lead to the planting of more trees. Moreover, as a hardy tree, its low maintenance cost may also be a reason lead to its increase.
We liked the idea of presenting the data visualizations on a sketchbook, flipping pages to reveal more information. A sketchbook is commonly used to present a study of a specific object, especially one found in nature. If we pursued this project further, we might create a video in which a person is drawing on a sketchbook while the story is being narrated.
Since our narrative is a playful one, we decided to present our data in an a whimsical way as well. This was the reason behind the bar charts made out of trees, and the timeline chart, which slightly over inflates the importance of the ginkgo tree. Our story is a story of human interest intended to build appreciation of the Ginkgo tree as well as to describe a possible reason for its popularity in NYC. Because of this, we decided that the best way to draw our audience in was to tell a story in an informal way that allows our audience to feel like they are discovering the story of the Ginkgo tree’s popularity on their own.
Link to presentation: Ginkgo – more than just a smelly tree
Sources:
The 1995, 2005, and 2015 NYC Tree Census
The 1990, 2000, and 2010 US Census Data
Why do we keep planting stinky Ginkgos?