Classifier trees, planted behind real oaks

Export the decision trees that learned Freiburg's forest from Overstory, and plant them in Buntwald beside a Grove oak like any other species.

Fourteen copies of one Overstory decision tree behind three European oaks: 17 trees from three clicks in Buntwald, downloaded as the A5 print file (2480 × 1748 px) and cropped here to the trees.

The red trees at the back never grew anywhere. Each one is a decision tree from the classifier that learned where the woods around Freiburg are, the same model as in Freiburg's forest, drawn by the model that found it, and its crown is made of the tree's verdicts. The teal oaks in front did grow, in The Grove, the tree simulator behind every species Buntwald ships with.

Below: which Overstory settings make a tree worth exporting, what the pack holds, how it becomes a species, and why the shapes give the classifier trees away. The trees come from this forest in Overstory; open it and follow along.

How this one got made

Right angles, and the buds left small

In Overstory, set Branch shape to Right angles, the shape a decision tree has when it is printed in a paper. Against Buntwald's grown trees it is the shape that stands out most. The link above also sets How hard it looks to 5 and Trees in view to 10.

The source forest in Overstory: How hard it looks 5, Right angles, Bud size 1. It gets 82.3 % right; at this size a verdict is a dot.

Leave Bud size at 1, although the buds are barely visible on screen. Every bud goes into the pack sixteen times larger than you see it, because at screen size it would be too small for Buntwald to find a crown in. At Bud size 5, where the Overstory post ends up, that crown swells into two big balls that hide the branches.

The strongest tree of the pack as Buntwald draws it, exported at Bud size 5 and at Bud size 1. Only the second still shows the diagram it came from.

I left the export without appearance sliders of its own: a second set of sliders is how the export once drifted away from the picture. What you see in The drawing is what leaves the app.

Eight trees in a zip

Open Export for Buntwald. Trees to export starts at 8, and Which trees picks The strongest or Across the whole range, from best to weakest. Under Downloads, press Build tree pack, then Tree pack (ZIP).

Everything the export asks: how many trees, and which ones.

Inside are two renders per tree, the wood and the leaves, plus a small pack.json recording where the trees came from, what the model scored and both data credits.

The three strongest trees of the pack, wood in navy over the leaves in grey. The strongest ends in 32 verdicts, so it carries 32 buds; a pair like this is all Buntwald reads a tree from.

The pack becomes a species

Open this sky and ground in Buntwald first: a link starts a new visit, and a new visit forgets imported trees. In Tree, press Add trees at the bottom of the group and drop the zip into Add trees (.zip). The trees join the Species list.

The imported trees sit between the Grove species. The name is the place and the year; the link carries no place name, so the place is its coordinates.

Pick it. Competition lists the trees by rank, r01 being the strongest, and the line under the render says 5 m, because each tree asks at most five questions. I named the pack's files the way Buntwald already names its Grove renders, so Buntwald's filename parser reads them unchanged. In Colours, set Crown to red (#c44536) and Trunk and Branches to dark green (#283d3b).

The tell is in the shapes

From here nothing is special about the classifier tree: it takes the same crown and wood abstraction, the same four styles and the same colours as any Grove tree. Switch Species to Silver Birch, Open-grown, 15 m, to compare; the colours stay.

A Grove birch and the strongest classifier tree, same colours, same four styles. The birch forks where its wood forked; the classifier tree forks where its questions did.

A birch and a decision tree do not branch the same way, and side by side that difference is the whole picture.

Classifier trees behind, oaks in front

Back on the classifier tree, click the canvas twice just below the horizon, left and right of centre. Switch Species to European Oak, Open-grown, 15 m, set its Crown to teal (#197278) and click lower down, in the middle.

Each click plants one tree, and its card under the canvas turns it into a stand. Give both classifier stands Tree count 7, Base size 0.55 and Horizontal range 0.42, and the oaks 3 trees at 0.42, spread a little wider. Some Height variation, Mirror chance and Colour variation stop the copies looking pasted.

Left, three clicks: one tree per stand, the oak as tall as the classifier trees behind it. Right, after the cards: 17 trees, and the oaks small enough to sit in front of the wood.

From screen to object

Under Downloads, tick the licence box. PNG (A5, 300 dpi) is the scene at 2480 × 1748 pixels, the file the picture at the top was cropped from. SVG (outline) keeps the crown outlines and the main branches as line art for Scribe.

The scene's SVG (outline), drawn here on white and cropped to the trees. Every crown is a ring and every branch a double line.

Download both before you close the tab: the imported trees go with the visit. If the scene turns out well, Order a print of this creation sends it off to be printed.

Your turn

Open the source forest in Overstory and change one thing, such as the place in Search or Across the whole range for weaker, stranger trees, then plant the pack in Buntwald. Then send me what you made. I'll ask before I show it anywhere.

Next, a planted forest becomes a scratched tree line: Scribe a forest.