CHARLESTON, WV (LOOTPRESS) – The city of Charleston recently earned itself the title of “America’s Leafiest Capital City.”
Nearmap, a leading location intelligence and aerial imagery solutions provider, today released a first-of-its-kind report, America’s Top 25 Leafiest Capital Cities via Nearmap AI, highlighting the country’s Top 25 leafiest capital cities.
Compiled through its proprietary aerial imagery technology and coupled with location data from its Nearmap AI platform, this is the first and only research of its kind in the U.S. using a high-resolution data set to compare total residential tree cover across capital cities for insurers, commercial construction companies and governments.
The report identified the top 25 leafiest capital cities and their percentage of total residential tree coverage as:
- Charleston, West Virginia (74.7%)
- Tallahassee, Florida (56.1%)
- Little Rock, Arkansas (54.9%)
- Raleigh, North Carolina (54.7%)
- Nashville, Tennessee (53.5%)
- Atlanta, Georgia (53.1%)
- Annapolis, Maryland (51.0%)
- Concord, New Hampshire (49.2%)
- Jackson, Mississippi (47.5%)
- Augusta, Maine (46.3%)
- Jefferson City, Missouri (43.3%)
- Austin, Texas (43.2%)
- Olympia, Washington (42.9%)
- Columbia, South Carolina (40.1%)
- Richmond, Virginia (39.9%)
- Albany, New York (39.1%)
- Montgomery, Alabama (34.9%)
- Baton Rouge, Louisiana (34.1%)
- St. Paul, Minnesota (33.2%)
- Des Moines, Iowa (31.4%)
- Topeka, Kansas (30.6%)
- Indianapolis City, Indiana (29.5%)
- Springfield, Illinois (27.7%)
- Frankfort, Kentucky (26.3%)
- Columbus, Ohio (26.1%)
“The volume of tree cover can have a significant impact on public health and safety, from preventing overheating, improving environmental health, and mental and physical health benefits,” said Tony Agresta, Executive Vice President and General Manager of North America at Nearmap. “Beyond that, the insights gleaned from this data can be used by insurers, construction companies and local governments to create tangible change in their communities, in addition to tracking progress in the creation of greener cities, reducing natural disaster risk and progressing urban development.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an average of 702 heat-related deaths occurred in the U.S. annually between 2004-2018. Urban heat islands can also create issues such as higher daytime temperatures, reduced nighttime cooling, poor air and water quality and increased demand for energy resources that can result in rolling blackouts.
“Data of this detail and consistency has never been possible on such a national scale before. Our Nearmap AI platform uses machine learning to turn high-resolution aerial imagery into information and insights, creating a proprietary dataset that our customers use as a source of truth to make our communities more sustainable, resilient, safe and appealing to residents,” said Dr. Michael Bewley, Vice President of AI and Computer Vision at Nearmap.
Nearmap surveys more than 100 million locations in the United States up to three times per year, making it easy for local governments, insurers and construction companies to continuously unlock AI insights needed to track their performance against goals, identify new areas of concern and measure community impact.
To inform the development of America’s Top 25 Leafiest Capital Cities report, Nearmap pulled historical and current tree canopy high-resolution aerial imagery on residential areas covering more than 275 million inhabitants, and harnessed Nearmap AI machine-learning capabilities to identify and analyze residential tree cover density and changes in capital cities throughout the United States.
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