Golden Gate Park


I didn't know Golden Gate Park, SF was larger than Central Park, NY. Well, it is. 3 miles x 0.5 miles vs. 2.5 miles x 0.5 miles. What I still don't believe is that there are reputed to be 1 million trees in Golden Gate Park, vs. a mere 26,000 trees in Central Park. [The Presidio has about 100,000 trees. See tree-huggers vs. sand-huggers.]


So I did some math. GG Park is about 3,840,000 square meters or 384 hectares (its area.) Divide that by 1,000,000 and you get 3.84 square meters per tree. That's a stocking density of over 2500 trees/hectare, which would make the park, by far, the most densly forested area anywhere in the world. The numbers are hard to come by, but I saw something like 700 trees/hectare (trees over a certain "dbh" or "diameter at breast height") for the Amazon rain-forest. Divide the park's area by 25,000 and you get roughly 150 square meters per tree or 65 trees/hectare. That's a lot more like it. That's the number I'm going with.


My guess is that the 1 million number, is the number of trees in the entire Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which has a total area of 30525 hectares of land and water, which would mean an average stocking density of about 32 trees/hectare, which sounds reasonable.