Interactive map of the Meerbusch city area with tree crowns, search areas and the heat load by day and night. Pan and zoom with the mouse, two fingers, or the zoom buttons. Figures for the active layers appear as text in the status box at bottom right and in detail in the section below the map. Individual trees can be selected by clicking.
Land use types
Background
Notes on visualisations and data
The starting view shows the city centre: every mint-coloured area is a tree crown, the pale lines are the street network. Drag to pan, mouse wheel or two fingers to zoom. Zooming in resolves the overview into individual trees, and each one is clickable. The Search areas switch shows connected street space of 150 m² or more that currently has no crown cover and no tree within eight metres. The row below selects one or more land use types, highlights them, and shows their measured crown coverage. The Buildings switch adds the official footprints as context underneath. The Parking switch shows parking strips and areas from OpenStreetMap — not an official survey; the space count derived from it is an estimate and a lower bound. The two heat switches separate what the rest of this map series treats as one thing: Heat by day shows the heat stress at 3 pm, Heat at night the modelled air temperature at 4 am. Both cover the whole area and lie beneath the crowns, which is why the trees are hidden when a heat layer is switched on. The Places switch shows specific gathering places — schools, kindergartens, playgrounds, bus stops, benches — with their actually measured shade; warm-coloured rings are under 10 percent. The Aerial image switch puts the official orthophoto underneath from neighbourhood zoom onwards, to check the vector data against reality.
A search area is not automatically a safe, new tree location. Whether a tree can stand there depends on underground utilities, emergency access routes, sightlines, and whether — and how many — parking spaces may be removed. Search areas therefore show where a closer look might be worthwhile.
The areas come from ALKIS (actual land use). Tree positions are our own derivation from the official normalised surface model (nDOM50, 50 cm grid spacing) — no tree register, no species, no planting year. Trees are detected from about five metres in height, including on private land; hits on buildings were discarded using the official ALKIS footprints.
The "Parking" layer shows parking strips and areas from OpenStreetMap. Unlike in Berlin, no official parking survey exists here: the space count is estimated from the length of the parking strips (5.5 m per longitudinal space) and is therefore a lower bound, not a count. OpenStreetMap is incomplete, and where nothing is recorded the map shows nothing — not "no one parks here". No legal claims can be derived from this data; the signage on site is what applies.
Shows the heat stress on the human body at 3 pm, measured as Physiologically Equivalent Temperature (PET) from the North Rhine-Westphalia climate analysis 2026 by the State Office for Nature, Environment and Climate (LANUK), computed with the FITNAH 3D model. PET accounts for humidity, wind and radiation in addition to air temperature.
The five classes are cut at the absolute thresholds of VDI guideline 3787 (23, 29, 35, 41 °C) rather than, as is usual, by quantiles of this one city's distribution. "Strong heat stress" therefore literally means "PET of 35 °C and above" here, not "the hottest fifth of this city". Only that makes the layer comparable between cities.
The grid spacing is 25 m — fine enough to tell individual streets apart, unlike the 100 m analyses of other German states.
The official orthophoto (DOP20, 20 cm ground resolution) from Geobasis NRW sits beneath the other layers as an image base from neighbourhood zoom onwards, loaded live for each map view. It serves the immediate check: is a parking strip, a search area or a tree crown really where the vector data puts it? Licence dl-de/zero-2.0.
Official building footprints (LoD2, Geobasis NRW), shown as grey context beneath the other layers. Coverage is filled in gradually; where no tile is available yet, the area stays empty rather than being shown incorrectly.
Shows specific gathering places — schools, kindergartens, playgrounds, churches, cemeteries, sports grounds, bus stops, benches — with the actually measured crown coverage in their surroundings. The radius depends on the place: 60 m at a school, 20 m at a bus stop, 15 m at a bench. In Meerbusch, 457 of 849 places are under 10 % shaded. This is the map's real purpose: even the fine 25 m grid of the climate analysis can make no claim about a single place this small.
The district boundaries come from the official ALKIS dataset (Geobasis NRW, dl-de/zero-2.0). The figures per district — tree count, crown coverage, heat-pocket share, recorded parking length, search areas — are computed from the same data as the citywide values, just limited to that district's area. Small rounding differences from the city total are edge effects of clipping at the boundaries.