If you had asked me to explain the squirrel coverage at Central Park one week ago, I would not have been able to. Yet, here I am, one week later, with a web map and a blog post dedicated to the subject.
Turns out, studying the distribution and characteristics of the squirrels in Central Park is very interesting and informative. Mapping the data made it much easier to see patterns within the dataset. The first pattern I noticed was that the majority of the squirrels have gray fur. Cinnamon-colored fur is second most common, followed by just a handful with black fur. The second thing that stood out to me was the sheer number of squirrels. There are so many. Almost all of the grassy areas on the map are covered by the squirrel icons.
Taking a closer look at the grassy areas, however, I realized that there are certain spots where there were no squirrels. Curious as to why this might be, I added a NYC Tree Canopy map as a layer, which you see as the green dots on my map. I realized that the areas with no squirrels are also the areas with no trees. In hindsight, I should have expected this since the open areas with no trees are probably where people are mostly concentrated, so you would expect to see fewer squirrels there.
See for yourself in the map below! Each squirrel is represented by a small squirrel icon, color-coded based on their observed fur color. The green dots represent tree coverage.
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