Mapping Existing Canopy Coverage

Friends of Jefferson the Beautiful worked with Dana Brown & Associates, Inc. to create the Jefferson Parish Urban Forest Master Plan. One major goal of the project is to find out where more trees are needed and where planting them would be most beneficial. First, they used high-quality aerial photos and a special tree-mapping tool called i-Tree, made by the U.S. Forest Service, to map the trees already in the parish. To make the process easier, Jefferson Parish was split into four geographic areas:

• East Bank

• West Bank River

• West Bank Middle

• Grand Isle

The images below show (in green) the tree canopy coverage in each of the four geographic areas.