Cities publish street tree inventories that almost nobody reads: NYC Tree Map lets you look a tree up, and in 2013 Melbourne gave its trees email addresses for reporting damage, and people ended up writing them love letters. Nobody has closed the loop. Street Tree Talks gives each tree a voice built from its real record (species, planting year, size) plus today's weather, so it texts you first, about its own life, and asks for the one thing it needs: water.
The data it runs on
Tree records: open street tree inventories: NYC Street Tree Census (2015, about 666,000 trees, NYC Open Data), London borough tree data gathered by the Greater London Authority, Paris "Les arbres" on opendata.paris.fr, and City of Melbourne's Urban Forest dataset. Fields: species, location, often planting year, height, trunk diameter.
Weather: a free forecast API such as Open-Meteo for temperature, rain and days since meaningful rain, per tree location.
Access: nightly download of each city's CSV or Socrata/Opendatasoft API into one schema; weather fetched hourly per neighbourhood, not per tree.
Limits and fallback: many records lack a planting year or are years out of date, and some trees have since been felled. Missing ages are estimated from trunk diameter and labelled "about". Users can flag a missing or wrong tree, and a city without open data shows a "map your street" mode where neighbours add trees. All tree records in this demo are labelled sample.
1. The mission
Make every street tree somebody's tree. A tree that texts you when it is thirsty gets watered, and a street where people know their trees fights to keep them.
2. Why people can't resist it
It noticed you first. A message from the 94-year-old plane outside your window feels personal in a way a map pin never does.
Care with a scoreboard. Watering streaks, a moisture bar that rises when you pour, a thank you that arrives an hour later.
Neighbourhood gossip. Trees mention each other: the rowan at No. 31 is struggling. You end up meeting the people who live there.
3. How it works for real
Find: address lookup snaps to the nearest inventory trees within 30 m.
Ground: a fact sheet per tree: record fields, species traits from a curated table, weather, neighbours, the watering log.
Talk: a fast cheap model (Gemini Flash or DeepSeek via OpenRouter) writes the tree's messages and replies in first person, only from the fact sheet. A frontier model (Claude) writes the species personality prompts once per species.
Nudge: rules decide when the tree texts first: a dry spell for young trees, first frost, leaf fall, a storm warning.
Report: damage reports go to the city's 311 or council form with a photo, prefilled with the tree ID.
4. Cost per use
Pennies per tree per month: about 30 short messages at roughly $0.0002 each, plus shared weather calls. Under $0.01 per adopted tree per month.
Free: adopt one tree and chat with any tree on your street. Grove ($2 a month): adopt up to 10 trees, seasonal photo diary, a printed "my tree" year card. Councils pay for a dashboard of watering and reports.
5. Growth loop
Trees ask you to tell the neighbour whose young tree is thirsty. Share cards ("My tree is 94 and thirsty") go to street WhatsApp groups. Councils promote the app because watered young trees survive.
6. Risks and guardrails
Safety: trees never ask anyone to climb, prune or touch damaged trees; they say "report it".
Accuracy: every claim comes from the record or the species table; "sample" and "about" labels where data is missing.
Privacy: the map shows trees, not people. Adopters appear by first name only if they choose.
Over-watering: logs cap advice at the city's guidance (about 50 L a week for young trees in dry spells).
7. MVP build order
Import one city's inventory, address lookup, street map with tappable trees.
Fact sheet plus chat with a cheap model, with quick replies.
Weather and the "tree texts first" rules for dry spells.