Digital Dendrology

The internet is a wilderness: it is so full of raw information, data, paths and endpoints, that it is easy to lose your way and very difficult to tell what is important among the mass. A perfect example is Google Earth – within its servers are infinite points of data that are simultaneously empowering and incomprehensible.
In this project, I created a system to help digital explorers better navigate Google Earth, specifically looking at the digital trees that populate the program.
Though algorythmically rendered, these trees are based on satellite photographs and therefore have real-world equivalences. By comparing data to printed and cataloged botany databases, I was able to identify the species and location of many Google Earth trees. I organized these into a hand held field guide, easy to use while traveling the web, that features both sample identifications, GPS coordinates of identified trees and tools for aiding the reader in their own research.