Location: Glasgow, Scotland (UK)
Credit: Danielle Richardson
Initiative: Glasgow as a Living Laboratory Accelerating Novel Transformation (GALLANT) (NERC Change the Environment Programme) (Natural Environment Research Council/ UKRI)
Project: communiMap
Story: Chris and Annie are part of a community tree-mapping group that meets regularly in Elder Park, Govan, working in small teams to record each tree’s height, circumference, species and condition using the communiMap app. It’s slower and more exacting than it looks: different clinometers give different readings, technique gets refined session by session, and the method itself is something the group has had to work out together rather than simply follow. So far they’ve logged just over 400 trees across this one park.
Govan was once one of the world’s great shipbuilding districts, and Elder Park sits directly across the road from the former Fairfield Shipyard. Isabella Elder, widow of the shipbuilder John Elder, gifted the land to the community in 1885 as a green space for healthful recreation, somewhere shipyard workers and their families could rest from that same industrial life.
That kind of close, repeated attention produces findings an occasional official survey would likely miss. Among the group’s recent observations: 48 trees planted since 2014, seven of which have since died, many still fitted with the stakes and ties used to support them as saplings nearly a decade ago, ties that can slowly cut into a trunk if left on too long. The group was able to flag it directly to Annie, who has been closely involved in the care of the park’s trees.
The tape measure in this photo is doing two things at once: recording a number that adds to that growing dataset, and giving two people, one of them still learning the method, a reason to stand still and look closely at the same tree, in a park that was carved out of farmland and given to Govan’s shipyard workers as somewhere to slow down, where that same patient, repeated attention now belongs to the trees instead.