On40Acres

Where to plant: parks and streets in the lowest tree-density areas

July 23, 2026by alan
Map of Palo Alto showing the coarse native-oak density heat map with the top 10 planting-priority parks highlighted in green

Building on the native-oak density work in bio-sim/notebooks/species_explorer.ipynb, we overlaid park boundaries and road centerlines on the 1000 ft tree-density grid to find where planting effort would close the biggest gaps — public parks and streets that currently sit in the lowest-density (<0.2 trees/acre) areas.

Parks

Park boundaries came from the California Protected Areas Database (CPAD). Ranking parks by acres of overlap with low-density cells surfaces the city's large open-space parks first, since they have the most plantable area:

Map of Palo Alto showing the coarse native-oak density heat map with the top 10 planting-priority parks highlighted in green
  1. Baylands Preserve
  2. Shoreline at Mountain View Park
  3. Enid Pearson-Arastradero Preserve
  4. Esther Clark Park
  5. John Lucas Greer Park
  6. Mitchell Park
  7. Baylands Athletic Center
  8. Burgess Park
  9. Hoover Park
  10. Martin Luther King Park

Streets

Road centerlines came from Caltrans' public roads network. Ranking by absolute overlap length favors long arterials just because they're long, so instead we ranked by the percentage of each street's own length that falls in low-density cells — surfacing short residential streets that are entirely under-canopied:

Map of Palo Alto showing the coarse native-oak density heat map with the top 100 planting-priority streets highlighted in red
  1. Campus Dr
  2. Jardin Dr
  3. E Meadow Cir
  4. Ferne Ave
  5. Raimundo Way
  6. Alvin St
  7. Salvatierra St
  8. Green St
  9. Ln B
  10. Page Mill Rd

Splitting the ranked list into tiers shows how quickly priority drops off: the top 200 streets (red) versus the next 800 (lighter orange) by percentage of low-density overlap.

Map of Palo Alto showing the top 200 planting-priority streets in red and the next 800 in lighter orange

413 of the 496 road miles and the bulk of park acreage in the study area (Palo Alto and immediate neighbors) fall below the 0.2 trees/acre threshold — a lot of room for native oak planting.