User:SK53/Rendering Trees

Summary of various ideas & attempts to deepen rendering of trees, woods and forests at a whole range of scales.

Woods & Forests

Basic idea (a least for non Tropical & Sub-tropical parts of Northern Hemisphere, the Holartic) is to work with a three fold hierarchy:

• Wood/Forest, the basic starting point; natural=wood or landuse=forest
• wood=*. This should contain a small number of disjunct concepts: wood=coniferous,wood=broad-leaved, wood=palm and wood=mixed seem OK for now. These can be combined with deciduous=yes for deciduous woodland. wood=deciduous should be avoided, particularly as a synonym for broad-leaved.
• woodland=*. Representing the dominant tree species of the woodland area. Possibly as multiple tags or with a hyphen as in woodland=oak-hickory_woodland. In general this can work at the generic or specific level (certainly important for Oaks in Europe).

A host of other information may be desired:

• Is the wood ancient (primary woodland, per-1600 in UK, Urwaelder in DE,AT,CH).
• Is the wood self-sustaining or originally planted
• Is the wood a plantation, i.e., trees are planted in rows for ease of harvesting. This is common in UK for commercial forestry (usually non-native conifers) and frequent across Europe with Poplars.
• Conservation protection.
• Management
• Organisation: ownership & operator
• Detailed info on Vegetation, using phytosociological information.
• Usage (hunting, leisure, amenity, eco-services, protection from floods, avalanche, mud and other debris slides etc).

Icon Creation

Basic Process

• Collect good quality undamaged leaf
• Ideally press it
• Scan on flatbed scanner at quite high resolution (300 or 600 dpi according to leaf size)
• Import into photo editor, rotate so petiole is pointing to top-left corner
• Size canvas so leaf occupies about 80% of width/height of image
• Shrink to 1024 pixels square
• Generate an all black matt of the image using a suitable threshold value
• Select the matt and use a border finding function, I use about 8 pixels.
• Copy the selected border and safe as a PNG with transparent background
• Import into Inkscape & run the Path on bitmap command, remove the imported bitmap & save at 1024px square as an SVG
• Now change line colour and stroke width. Currently I'm using a mid-green and 24 px

PNG files of various sizes can be created from this. The base SVG can be tweaked easily to produce a suitable range of icons:

• Leaf outline
• Leaf filled
• Leaf outline on background colour
• Leaf filled on background colour
• ...

Trees native and widely naturalised to Britain and Ireland

This is the starting point:

Forest Trees (i.e., ones which form dominant component of woodlands):

• Scot's Pine Pinus sylvestris
• Yew, Taxus baccata. leaf DONE
• White Willow Salix alba
• Crack Willow Salix (x) fragilis), leaf DONE
• Aspen, Populus tremula, leaf DONE
• Alder Alnus glutinosa, leaf DONE
• Silver Birch Betula pendula, leaf DONE
• Downy Birch Betula pubescens
• Small-leaved Lime
• Large-leaved Lime Tilia, leaf DONE
• Pedunculate Oak Quercus rubor, leaf DONE
• Sessile Oak Quercus petraea, leaf DONE
• Beech, Fagus sylvatica, leaf DONE
• Sycamore, leaf DONE
• Ash, leaf DONE

Commercial Forest Trees (non-native)

• Hemlock
• Stika Spruce
• Black (Corsican or Austrian Pine) Pinus nigra
• Larch, Larix decidua leaf DONE
• Dunkeld Larch, Larix x
• Hybrid Poplar cvs., leaf DONE

Other Woodland trees

• Grey Poplar
• White Poplar
• Goat Willow
• Buckthorn
• Wild Cherry
• Bird Cherry
• Whitebeam
• Crab Apple
• Wild Pear
• Wild Service Tree
• Sorbus microspecies
• Rowan, leaf DONE
• Field Maple
• Hornbeam, leaf DONE

Scrub-forming trees

• Juniper
• Grey Willow
• Purple Willow
• Almond Willow, Salix triandra
• Osier, Salix viminalis
• Hazel, Corylus
• Blackthorn
• Hawthorn, leaf DONE
• Sea Buckthorn

Common amenity Trees in Urban areas

• Horse Chestnut, leaf DONE
• Italian Alder, leaf DONE
• London Plane
• Cherry Plum, Prunus cerasifolia, leaf DONE
• Common Pear, Pyrus communis
• Turkey Oak
• Holm Oak
• Red Oak
• Norway Maple, Acer platanoides,
• Silver Maple
• Walnut
• Japanese Cherry cvs. ex Prunus serratula, leaf DONE
• Gingko
• False Acacia

Common Parkland Trees

• Wellingtonia
• Cedar of Lebanon
• Deodar Cedar
• Atlas Cedar
• Lucombe Oak

Special Collection trees

• Dawn Redwood
• Woolemera Pine
• Cork Oak
• Handkerchief Tree