Sabzaar
سبزار
A greening project for Larkana by Dr. Safeer Ali Mirani
Larkana loses shade every summer as old trees come down. This map shows the city's real tree canopy and heat from satellite data, and points to where new native shade trees would help most.
Where to plant Guidance
Plantable spots (zoom in, click a dot)
Green dots are open, tree-free ground in the built-up core (not on a building or in a field), each with room for a tree. Switch to Satellite and zoom in; click a dot for its clearance.
Measured layers Satellite
Street, colony and chowk names come from OpenStreetMap on the basemap. Zoom in for more.
Detected trees (today's imagery, whole district)
Cyan dots are ~38,000 trees, each confirmed by four present-day signals - crown shape (DeepForest ML), greenness, canopy height (tall, not grass or shrub) and Sentinel-2 NDVI (actually vegetated) - and not on a rooftop. A high-confidence set: the raw model flagged ~84,000 candidates across Larkana's built-up district, and this keeps only the strongly-confirmed ones. Detected on an NVIDIA V100 GPU (CINECA Galileo100). Switch to Satellite and zoom in to see them.
Plant the right tree Guidance
Native, heat-tolerant shade trees suited to Larkana's climate and soils. Give large species room away from pavements, drains and walls.
Planting in a congested city
- Concentrate new trees on open ground: vacant plots, park and graveyard edges, school, college and hospital grounds, canal and road embankments, playgrounds.
- On a paved lane, make a tree pit - lift one paver block (about 1 x 1 m), plant, and add a guard. Keep the rest of the paving.
- For narrow streets, pick smaller or upright species (amaltas, ber, or neem kept pruned) so they clear the lane.
- Where there is no ground at all, use large containers on rooftops, courtyards and shopfronts, and green the walls.
- Line plantings into shade corridors along walking routes, bus stops and markets.
Why not Conocarpus?
- Very high water uptake that can pull down an already stressed water table.
- Aggressive roots that break into pavements, drains and sewer lines.
- Pollen linked to respiratory allergy in a Karachi University study.
- Non-native, with little food or habitat value for local birds and insects.
- Thin shade for the amount of water it uses.
Sindh restricted new Conocarpus planting in 2016, and Karachi authorities have been replacing it with indigenous species. Sources: Dawn, Dawn (experts), EnvPK. Existing trees need not be removed rashly; new planting is better spent on natives.
How to read this map
Measured - canopy, land cover and heat come from satellites. They show where trees are and how tall, not species or age.
Guidance - "where to plant" is derived from that data, and the species list is a curated recommendation. Both are advice, not a site survey.
Community - resident-logged trees with photos and species are planned for a later phase, and are not shown yet.
Air quality - Larkana has no public ground sensor, so there is no honest street-level AQI to show. A modeled city reading, coarse satellite NO₂ , and low-cost community sensors are planned for the next phase. Trees are part of the fix.