As Philadelphia plants thousands of trees to help cool heat-stricken sections of the city, residents can use a new online tool to see how the decade-long project might help their neighborhoods.
You can slide between two overlapping maps of the city: one that reveals how bad the summer heat problem is on a detailed, block-by-block basis, and another that shows which areas are prioritized for tree-planting.
There’s also a standalone map with detailed info showing how temperature islands shift throughout the day. The western part of Washington Avenue in Point Breeze, for example, is one of the city’s hottest places in the city in mornings and evenings, but other areas get hotter midday.
The maps are part of a new website developed by the Nature Conservancy’s Pennsylvania staff, which describes how citizen-scientists collected heat readings around the city last summer and what they found.