Prioritize Tab

TreeKeeper® Canopy’s Prioritize tab allows you to prioritize planting locations within the area of interest. Depending on the scope of the project and availability of GIS data layers, the application will have different criteria that can be used for analysis. This section will walk through the elements of the Prioritize tab and provide an example of how to use the tools.

Select Your Layer

In the application, you have the option to select from Census Tracts or Census Block Groups as your prioritization layer. This is because of a limiting factor that socio demographic data is only accurately reported at these levels and is very challenging and time consuming to split this data for other layers. Therefore, these are the two selections.

Census Tracts - Great for large communities or county-level analysis where there are many tracts that can be prioritized.

Census Block Groups - Great for smaller communities to conduct more granular analysis given that these are smaller in area than Tracts.

Select Your Criteria and Weights

After selecting the layer, now you can begin picking the criteria that you would like to use for prioritization. Selecting a weight of None means that the variable will not be included in the analysis. A weight set to Low has some emphasis and a High weight indicates that the variable is very important. Moving the sliders around for each variable will allow for dynamic prioritization within the Map Frame. As you adjust variables and weights, the model will update automatically and calculate a new prioritization ranking.

In this example, different variables have been selected and weighed to produce the result.

Investigate Your Priority Locations

Using the filter button on the Vertical Toolbar, you will have the option to Filter Priorities to the highest ranking areas. This Filter is only available when the Prioritize tab is active. To remove the Filter, click the Reset button.

You can also zoom in and out to review the priority areas.

In the Map Frame, use your mouse to click on a tract or block group with a high priority. You will see a pop up that now displays all the criteria in a bar graph. This is to let you know why a certain tract or block group was ranked the way it was.

In this example, you can see that this block group was the 9th highest ranked out of 244 making it a high priority (or opportunity) for new tree planting.

Reviewing Vacant Planting Areas

In the same pop up window, you will see another button called Vacant Sites. If you click this button, the application will populate the Results Table with all the vacant planting locations within the selected feature.

The vacant site data will have information based on address and other attributes that you can use for locating the site. After selecting the sites that you are interested in, you can click the CSV or PDF button to export a copy of the data.

*For TreeKeeper users, you can Select All or a subset of these vacant sites by using the tools in the Data Panel. Once you have them selected, click Copy Selected IDs and paste them into the TreeKeeper Site ID attribute search to bring up all the locations. These can then be assigned as work orders for planting crews or volunteers.