Finding the Best Cherry Blossom Streets in Vancouver

Why we picked it

Finding the Best Cherry Blossom Streets in Vancouver: Geospatial Analysis, Route Optimization, and Science Communication with R Every spring, Vancouver's streets burst into pink, but which ones are \*actually\* worth visiting? And could you see the best of them all in a single route? This talk walks through an end-to-end open data science project that answers exactly those questions. Using freely available datasets from the [City of Vancouver Open Data Portal](https://opendata.vancouver.ca/) (public tree inventories, street networks, and neighbourhood boundaries) we filter thousands of trees down to Japanese flowering cherry varieties, snap each tree to its nearest street segment using \`{sf}\`, and compute blossom density per block to rank the top streets city-wide. We then solve a Traveling Salesman Problem with \`{sfnetworks}\`, \`{igraph}\`, and Kyle Walker's \`{spopt}\` package to produce the \*\*Vancouver Cherry Blossom Marathon\*\*: an optimized route through the 10 or 30 dens