Evidence map›Paper›PMID 41741486›Full record

ArticleScientific reports2026

Unsupervised mapping of urban tree diversity using spatially-aware visual clustering.

Diaa Addeen Abuhani, Marco Seccaroni, Martina Mazzarello, Imran Zualkernan, Fabio Duarte, Carlo Ratti

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Scientific reports, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
0citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

0 citing papers in PubMed.

No citing paper in PubMed yet.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

6 authors.

Diaa Addeen AbuhaniDepartment of Urban Studies and Planning, Senseable City Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, Massachusetts, USA. diaa@mit.edu.
Marco SeccaroniDepartment of Urban Studies and Planning, Senseable City Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, Massachusetts, USA.
Martina MazzarelloDepartment of Urban Studies and Planning, Senseable City Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, Massachusetts, USA. mmazz@mit.edu.
Imran ZualkernanDepartment of Computer Science and Engineering, American University of Sharjah, 127 Street, University City, 26666, Sharjah, UAE.
Fabio DuarteDepartment of Urban Studies and Planning, Senseable City Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, Massachusetts, USA.
Carlo RattiDepartment of Urban Studies and Planning, Senseable City Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, Massachusetts, USA.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Urban tree biodiversity is critical for climate resilience, ecological stability, and livability in cities, yet most municipalities lack detailed knowledge of their canopies. Field-based inventories provide reliable estimates of Shannon and Simpson diversity but are costly and time-consuming, while supervised AI methods require labeled data that often fail to generalize across regions. We introduce an unsupervised clustering framework that integrates visual embeddings from street-level imagery with spatial planting patterns to estimate biodiversity without labels. Applied to eight North American cities, the method recovers genus-level diversity patterns with high fidelity, achieving low Wasserstein distances to ground truth for Shannon and Simpson indices and preserving spatial autocorrelation. This scalable, fine-grained approach enables biodiversity mapping in cities lacking detailed inventories and offers a pathway for continuous, low-cost monitoring to support equitable access to greenery and adaptive management of urban ecosystems.

Indexed as

BiodiversityTreesCitiesCluster AnalysisClustering AlgorithmsEcosystemBiodiversityClusteringStreetviewsUnsupervised Learning

Identifiers

PMID41741486
PMCPMC13031494

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY-NC-ND
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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.