Have you ever noticed a valley oak at sunrise, stretching out strong mossy branches as if it were yawning? Or two Mexican fan palms swaying side by side in the gentle breeze like lovers dancing dreamily? Or a southern magnolia with its stately grace and stunning flowers, bedecked as if for a tea party?
Trees are gentle reminders that there's more to life than the constant human bedlam we're embroiled in. They give us pause. A sense of calm. Serenity.
The city of San José is home to a million trees, most of them shade and ornamental varieties, all of them vital. Among other things, they prevent soil erosion, clean the air, and provide homes for millions of birds. But as this region underwent transformation from the orchard-laden Valley of Heart's Delight to the high-rise-ridden Silicon Valley, the city has had to make conscious efforts to conserve its trees. A huge part of that endeavor is making San José residents aware of the critical nature of our urban forest. San José State students are helping achieve that goal, 21st-century style.
In 2007, Connie Chen, Rick Dexter and Kiran Sharma -- SJSU management information systems majors -- took on the challenge of pulling together tree information from different departments within the city and putting all of it in one easy-to-access online repository.
Jeanne Sawyer, the SJSU business professor overseeing this project, explains: "Say there's a tree on your property that you want to cut down for some reason, can you just go ahead and do it? Or if there's a street tree shading your solar panels, whom do you contact? Are there any rules? Or can you just do as you please? As it turns out, there are all kinds of rules. Now you can look them up with a click of the mouse."
Various city departments share the responsibility for planting, pruning or removing trees. "It has been very confusing for people to understand which department to contact," says Ralph Mize, the city arborist. "But with a centralized information center on the Web, we seem to be getting fewer phone calls."
Spanning more than a year, the project challenged the students on various fronts: technological, personal and administrative. "We had to learn ASP, Google maps API technology, Dreamweaver; deal with multiple image sizes; generate dynamic Web pages from a database; develop images with clickable regions and perform full-text searches," recalls Dexter. "But most importantly, it was about learning how the real business world works -- learning how to think, learning how to learn."
Chen, who also worked on the Web site, says she did not get a sense of how "big" this project was until she learned that the site has had two million visitors since its launch in early 2008. "When we received a commendation from the City Council, I realized that this wasn't just a Web site," she says. "It was a portal to the living, breathing world of trees."
A highlight of the Web site is a section on heritage trees. The 600-strong list includes sycamores, oaks, California pepper trees, cedars, elms -- all of them historic, exceptionally big, and of some special significance to the community. The students created an interactive Google map with the locations of each of these trees, linked to photos and botanical information on Wikipedia.
"Before this project, I had no idea heritage trees existed in San José," says Dexter. "Using the map, I found a valley oak on Trinidad Drive in Almaden. Its branches covered the three houses behind it and the one across the street. I've seen redwoods in Yosemite that are amazing, but I had never seen an oak that size before!"
Dexter has loaded the location of all the heritage trees in San José into his GPS and as he's driving around he often stops to look, to wonder, to pause and appreciate.
-- Mansi Bhatia
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