Info Graphic Fail
- lyleestill9
- May 22
- 1 min read
At the opening of the Tree Museum on January 25, 2025, I had several conversations about canopy loss with some of the attendees.
It made me wonder about the state of Pittsboro's tree cover in the face of our rapid development. I was certain that if we produced an "info graphic" on the topic it would be dramatic and could perhaps rekindle a conversation about the role of trees in our community.
I was wrong.
I enlisted the help of Audrey Ehrler, a graduate student at UNC. She deployed Google Earth with a plugin called Deep Vision by PUT. And I got help from Paget Blythe at Blythe Creative.
This is what we came up with:
Problem #1: I don't recognize the image as Pittsboro--I can't say where the courthouse would be.
Problem #2: You really have to study it to see what appears to be about an 11% canopy loss.
I wanted to publish this for the Climate Action Fair that the Haw River Assembly staged at the Plant on April 26, 2025, but I felt it was not strong enough. So I scrapped the project.
After a conversation with Bob, my wingman who lives on the other side of the creek, I retrieved this project from the trash, and here it is--on this newly minted Tree Museum page that Gloria created for me on the Plant's website.
Here's hoping it stimulates some conversations about our trees...
Wow, this is a great project, and an important one to keep documenting and observing which scales demonstrate the gravity of tree loss in Ptown. Thank you Lyle, Audrey, Paget, and Bob!!
Oooh, and a question: How did the mappers treat thinnings versus clearcuts? Final harvest is the biggest loss, as I understand it. Yes, thinnings are also a heavy impact on flora and fauna, but less so on climate: The net carbon uptake is more rapid after thinnings, I believe.
Dr Christopher Galik at NCSU is one of the most knowledgeable folks I know on this topic, locally. He's done a lot of carbon lifecycle analysis for woody-biomass utilization. Oh and Dr Dan Richter at Duke University is another expert -- more on soil science in forestry. (And the scary C loss in clearcuts in the Southeast comes from post-harvest oxidization of soil C, moreso than the loss of th…
As a followup suggestion, perhaps the best way to tackle this is to simply draw a 5 to 7 mile radius circle around the Courthouse, map all the woodlands in that circle, and then superimpose the Town boundary? I often find myself talking about "Greater Pittsboro" because we're much bigger than our Town limits.
Cool project! I attempted something like this 15 or 20 years ago, but nowhere near as well as this.
The thing that leaps to mind is this peculiar fact about Town limits: Our boundaries will grow as Chatham Park Investors (and other developers) voluntarily annex into Town. So, for example, all of Chatham Park's South Village, extending down to Moncure, would only enter Town limits at the stage where individual platts are submitted for subdivision or similar staff action. And that would mean that their acceptance/annexation into Town limits will likely be AFTER they've already been clearcut.
This is a helpful observation, in case the Climate Action Plan (currently in development) includes any kind of tree cover tracking.
Thanks for…