Taha Ebrahimi – author of Street Trees of Seattle: An Illustrated Walking Guide – will take us on a walking tour of the University Districts finest street tree specimens! We expect to cover 1.5-2 miles on this tour.

More about Street Trees of Seattle:

Seattle has one of the most diverse collections of street trees in the country (double the East Coast and triple the Midwest!). Street Trees of Seattle is an unconventional walking guide based on city data going back to 1950 that covers approximately 170,000 street trees. In an increasingly digital world, the book invites readers to slow down and embrace an analog approach to tree-spotting during their urban meanderings.

Using data visualization as a starting point, the author takes readers on a tour of existing street trees throughout Seattle’s neighborhoods and iconic parks through charming illustrations and maps. In the process, she educates on the history of the trees and the city, and offers up sketches of trees, leaves, and leaflets to identify trees throughout 33 different neighborhoods. The most notable of each species are highlighted, so urban adventurers can fully appreciate their surroundings or design their own walking routes to experience these natural wonders in their favorite areas.

Taha Ebrahimi is director of Tableau Public, a free platform to explore, create, and publicly share online data visualizations about publicly available data. She is also a judge of Iron Viz, the world’s largest virtual data visualization competition. Passionate about the storytelling power of data visualization to democratize the understanding of complex data insights, Taha began her career as a journalist at the Seattle Times and is a contributor to Crosscut where she writes about things like local mapmaking. She is the co-chair of the Cal Anderson Park Alliance and has been a recipient of fellowships granted by the Thomas J. Watson Foundation (IBM) and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.