DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.8370380
title: Vegetation Density Across NYC: Analysis of Land Cover Data (2017) within 200 meter Buffers of Points

description: Summary:
This repository contains spatial data files representing the density of vegetation cover within a 200 meter radius of points on a grid across the land area of New York City (NYC), New York, USA based on 2017 six-inch resolution land cover data, as well as SQL code used to carry out the analysis. The 200 meter radius was selected based on a study led by researchers at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which found that for a given point in the city, cooling benefits of vegetation only begin to accrue once the vegetation cover within a 200 meter radius is at least 32% (Johnson et al. 2020). The grid spacing of 100 feet in north/south and east/west directions was intended to provide granular enough detail to offer useful insights at a local scale (e.g., within a neighborhood) while keeping the amount of data needed to be processed for this manageable. 
The contained files were developed by the NY Cities Program of The Nature Conservancy and the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance through the Just Nature NYC Partnership. Additional context and interpretation of this work is available in a blog post.
 
References:
Johnson, S., Z. Ross, I. Kheirbek, and K. Ito. 2020. Characterization of intra-urban spatial variation in observed summer ambient temperature from the New York City Community Air Survey. Urban Climate 31:100583. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2020.100583
 
Files in this Repository:
Spatial Data (all data are in the New York State Plane Coordinate System - Long Island Zone, North American Datum 1983, EPSG 2263):
Points with unique identifiers (fid) and data on proportion tree canopy cover (prop_canopy), proportion grass/shrub cover (prop_grassshrub), and proportion total vegetation cover (prop_veg) within a 200 meter radius (same data made available in two commonly used formats, Esri File GeoDatabase and GeoPackage):
nyc_propveg2017_200mbuffer_100ftgrid_nowater.gdb.zip
nyc_propveg2017_200mbuffer_100ftgrid_nowater.gpkg 
Raster Data with the proportion total vegetation within a 200 meter radius of the center of each cell (pixel centers align with the spatial point data)
nyc_propveg2017_200mbuffer_100ftgrid_nowater.tif
Computer Code:
Code for generating the point data in PostgreSQL/PostGIS, assuming the data sources listed below are already in a PostGIS database.
nyc_point_buffer_vegetation_overlay.sql
 
Data Sources and Methods:
We used two openly available datasets from the City of New York for this analysis:
Borough Boundaries (Clipped to Shoreline) for NYC, from the NYC Department of City Planning, available at https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/open-data/districts-download-metadata.page 
Six-inch resolution land cover data for New York City as of 2017, available at https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Environment/Land-Cover-Raster-Data-2017-6in-Resolution/he6d-2qns 
All data were used in the New York State Plane Coordinate System, Long Island Zone (EPSG 2263). Land cover data were used in a polygonized form for these analyses.
The general steps for developing the data available in this repository were as follows:
Create a grid of points across the city, based on the full extent of the Borough Boundaries dataset, with points 100 feet from one another in east/west and north/south directions
Delete any points that do not overlap the areas in the Borough Boundaries dataset.
Create circles centered at each point, with a radius of 200 meters (656.168 feet) in line with the aforementioned paper (Johnson et al. 2020).
Overlay the circles with the land cover data, and calculate the proportion of the land cover that was grass/shrub and tree canopy land cover types. Note, because the land cover data consistently ended at the boundaries of NYC, for points within 200 meters of Nassau and Westchester Counties, the area with land cover data was smaller than the area of the circles.
Relate the results from the overlay analysis back to the associated points.
Create a raster data layer from the point data, with 100 foot by 100 foot resolution, where the center of each pixel is at the location of the respective points. Areas between the Borough Boundary polygons (open water of NY Harbor) are coded as "no data."
All steps except for the creation of the raster dataset were conducted in PostgreSQL/PostGIS, as documented in nyc_point_buffer_vegetation_overlay.sql. The conversion of the results to a raster dataset was done in QGIS (version 3.28), ultimately using the gdal_rasterize function.