On a Saturday afternoon last month in Bensonhurst Park, Caleb Roenigk approached a London plane tree, a cousin of the sycamore and the most commonly planted tree species across the City's parks.
Walking lightly and quickly through the grass, Roenigk shifted his gaze between his phone and the tree’s canopy. Having reached the tree’s trunk, he quickly pocketed his phone while drawing a retractable cloth tape measure to estimate the tree’s circumference at chest height, as though fitting it for a suit jacket: 85 centimeters, or 33-and-a-half inches. He tapped that number into the surveying app on his phone along with a short assessment of the tree's overall health, having judged its structure "full" and its condition "excellent" before starting off toward the next nearest tree he saw. The whole process took about 30 seconds, and he'd repeat it more than 100 times before the day was over.
Between last summer and early this May, Roenigk performed this ritual 7,280 times, making him far and away the most prolific assessor out of the 2,800 volunteer tree surveyors participating in last year's deciannual tree census, which monitors the growth and overall health of the 150,000 trees within the City's parks. The second most active surveyor, a Queens resident and longtime census contributor, clocked "only" 4,689 trees over the same time period, according to City data obtained by Hell Gate. Roenigk is single-handedly responsible for more than 11 percent of the roughly 70,000 trees assessed by all surveyors since the census started last May.