Introducing arborary.world

The mottled sunlight of a shaded cafe. The stately arch of branches over a quiet street. The rustle of palm fronds in the breeze. The green interludes of a hedge. The stateful beauty of a central park.

Trees have been intertwined with our cities for as long as we've had them.

Numerous studies show their benefits - from temperature control to mental health.

Often these living marvels amongst us go unappreciated - noticed consciously only for a swell of pollen or a slippery pile of leaves that interrupts the daily rhytm of life.

But if we zoom out and take stock; we can see a reflection of our cities in the trees that make them their home.

That's what arborary.world is about - making the world of trees, visible but hard to grasp in its entirety - more legible, while acknowledging that nature is fuzzy and amorphous. A digital map is no replacement for walking the trees - but maybe it can help you find where to walk.

Other Sites

We're not the only ones. There's a lot of municipal tree inventories. There are also sites that consolidate them.

These sites often have beautiful maps, engaging inventories, and invested communities.

What are we adding? Why create another dataset, another site?

Because we want to focus on a different layer than consumption - the data layer. Our goal is to produce a high-quality, widely reusable dataset - not just a map. (we might make some maps for fun and quality control).

We want to make it easier for people to take the data and branch off their own stories about the world's urban trees.

Data Curation Choices

Species Normalization

All records are normalized to a one or two part latin identifier - Genus epithet.

Hybrids use the normalized ascii x instead of × U+00D7.

Descriptions are currently primarily in english, though we are open to extension.

Cultivars are stripped Malus 'spring snow' high brnch becomes Malus.

Specificity: not all records are precise; only 4.86 million of our 5.75 million trees carry a scientific name. The other ~890,000 may have generic placeholders, such as Unknown, Palm, Shrub or Cactus.

Data Pipeline

Github

Also open source. To add a city, open an issue there with a link to the published inventory; the details we need are on the datasets page.

Licensing

We present aggregated data with propagated licensing obligations.

Every city carries a supplemental OSM partition, and OSM data is ODbL. © OpenStreetMap contributors has to appear wherever those rows are shown.

Data including OSM rows is a derived database and requires use under a share-alike license. OSM data can be completely pruned at runtime, however, to produce a dataset with distinct license obligations. Use merged_sources to filter out with any rows with OSM_ lineage for any data field.

-- Municipal and community rows only: no OSM content, no share-alike.
-- 191,798 of San Francisco's 203,622 rows survive this.
SELECT * FROM read_parquet(
  'https://storage.googleapis.com/trilogy_public_models/duckdb/trees/ussfo_tree_info_v2.parquet'
)
WHERE NOT starts_with(data_source, 'OSM_')
  AND NOT coalesce(contains(merged_sources, 'OSM_'), false);

Other inherited licensing varies by source. None named means the publisher puts the data out as open but never attached a licence to it; not stated means we looked and found nothing either way, which is not the same as unrestricted:

Source	Licence	Requirements
San Francisco	PDDL	Nothing — public domain dedication
Paris	ODbL	Attribution, and share-alike on derived databases
London	UK Open Government Licence	Attribution
Berlin	dl-de/by-2-0	Attribution
Melbourne	CC BY 4.0	Attribution
Vancouver	Open Government Licence – Vancouver	Attribution
New York City	No stated restrictions	NYC Open Data: "Open Data belongs to all New Yorkers. There are no restrictions on the use of Open Data." Portal terms of use still apply
Boston	PDDL	Nothing — public domain dedication
— Cambridge, Brookline, Arnold Arboretum	Unknown	Separate feeds; terms not confirmed
Burlington, VT	Not stated	Neither the feature service nor the city's open-data page states terms
Washington, DC	CC BY 4.0	Attribution to "District of Columbia (DC GIS)"
Los Angeles	None named	Governed by the portal's terms of use rather than a licence
Tempe	CC BY 4.0	Attribution — "Any use or representation of this data must cite the City of Tempe"
Amsterdam	None named	Published as public data — the API docs give access as "Geen; dit is openbare data" (none; this is public data)
Buenos Aires	CC BY 2.5 AR	Attribution
Athens	None named	Published as open data under the EU Open Data Directive (2019/1024)
Milos, Santorini	—	OSM + community only
OpenStreetMap — OSM_ rows, every city	ODbL	© OpenStreetMap contributors, shown wherever the rows are; see above on share-alike
Community submissions — COMMUNITY_ rows	Unknown	Terms for contributed trees are not settled yet
Species enrichment — tree_enrichment_v{n}.parquet	Mixed; per-photo for images	Assembled per binomial from GBIF, POWO, Wikipedia and SelecTree, which deserve credit regardless of terms. Photos are iNaturalist, licensed per photo by one of CC0, CC BY and CC BY-NC. Each photo row carries photo's licence and attribution as columns next to the URL. Check that column before reusing an image: a CC BY-NC photo is not usable commercially.
Ecoregions — ecoregion_info_v{n}.parquet	CC BY 4.0	Attribution to RESOLVE Ecoregions
The pipeline itself	MIT	Retain the notice