Yes I understand those risks. We only ever deal with single nodes of particular type, so it’s really hard to damage anything with a bad edit, worst case height is wrong or the tree is misplaced. We review this on our side and correct asap.

I hope this account and linked pages have enough information for anyone with good intent to contact us before reverting any edits.

Our initiative relies on volunteers, who are rather not tech savvy and understanding concepts of OSM would be too hard for them. We tried and that didn’t work. I did have another look on some popular apps, but nothing suits our needs.

For example, Vespucci fails to show anything to me atm, and StreetComplete only shows tree locations, other data like height, trunk circumference, crown diameter, health is not available. This is the data that we collect to monitor tree health. Vespucci makes that available, when it works, but the UI is so complex, has all possible OSM features, and has a learning curve even for those who are used to OSM. It’s more like a desktop app shoved into a mobile device; it runs on mobile devices, but isn’t necessarily mobile friendly. So we created a separate tool which focuses on trees explicitly and has a minimalist UI.

Anyway, I hope one day we will have enough developers to let users log in to OSM and post updates on their behalf, but currently a single service account is our only option.

Our initiative isn’t about enhancing OSM with data on trees. It’s about collecting extensive data on trees. There are many things that cannot be implemented using OSM alone, or are significantly harder to implement, like comments, multiple images and videos per photo. That’s why we decided to start as a separate thing, instead of trying to find ways to build something on top of OSM. But we are happy to share with the OSM community all data that has a place there. Some of us are long time OSM users and contributors.

Please - think about quality rather than quantity!

Yes we do. Speed increase comes from some specifics related to trees. For example, urban trees are more often than not planted in rows with a fixed step, so we have a UI to add those trees in a single operation, then individual trees can be moved or removed if they aren’t on the line strictly.

The operator then only has to measure parameters like height and circumference. Positioning a tree is actually the most time consuming part, which we can optimize. I don’t think there are many other mappable objects that follow this pattern, maybe except for the electric poles, so we don’t expect any other app to have this UI feature.

(I know there’s natural=tree_row, but we need data on individual trees which isn’t available for tree_row since it’s a line.)

Yes, we were have seen all those tools but they aren’t really mobile friendly and not optimized for the field work. So we decided to create our own app.

With our current solution one volunteer can add up to 90 new trees per hour, which is a good result which we couldn’t achieve with StreetComplete, Vespucci or any other tool.

I created the organized editing activity page, thank you.

osm.wiki/Organised_Editing/Activities/Yerevan_Tree_Map

Sure. Thank you for the heads up.