Working with Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement, we modeled five tree replanting sites in Kenya. In order to tell the greater story of trees on our planet, we worked with several environmental organizations to model reforestation projects and protected forests in Google Earth. In fact, urban trees only make up a very small percentage of the estimated more than 400 billion trees on our planet. Of course trees also grow and flourish outside of cities. All told, there are around 50 different tree species to explore in Google Earth and counting! With 3D trees in Google Earth, we’ve brought characteristic trees to life, from the palm trees that dot San Francisco's bayfront Embarcadero Street, to the olive trees that cling to the Acropolis in Athens, to the flowering dogwoods found in Tokyo’s parks. Prospective students can even scope out the beautiful greenery on campus at the University of California, Davis. In the new release of Google Earth 6, people in several cities will now be able to browse 3D trees in some of their favorite parks, and maybe even pick out a spot for their next picnic! Our urban tree coverage includes San Francisco (downtown and Golden Gate Park), Chicago (Grant, Millennium and Lincoln Parks), New York City (Prospect and Riverside Parks), Athens (Thiseio Park, the National Gardens, Lykavittos Hill and around the Acropolis), Berlin (Tiergarten Park) and Tokyo (Yoyogi Park, Shinjuku Gyoen and the Akasaka Imperial Grounds). Over time we’ve developed a way to produce highly detailed, photo-textured versions of specific tree species and reproduce them at large scale. Trees have been modeled individually in a handful of locations, such as Disney World and the Eiffel Tower, and we’ve learned from those instances to make sure we could represent trees in a realistic way that could scale to places where trees exist en masse, like urban parks and large forests. We strive to provide as much realism as possible in Google Earth, but until now, trees have largely been missing from the landscape of our product.

Earth view 3d