• ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    I wrote a mobile app years ago for a company that surveyed power lines to figure out what trees had to be cut away. They gave me a list of something like 800 tree species and I was like “do you guys really know what all these trees look like?” They did, it was a very impressive knowledge set.

    A fun fact about power lines in rural areas: property owners generally get compensated monetarily when their trees have to be trimmed for this, and the amount they get is dependent on the species of tree. So the surveyors would usually find all kinds of incredibly exotic shit planted directly under the lines, basically a cash crop for people living in the middle of nowhere. This is probably a huge and under-appreciated factor in the spread of invasive species.