Urban tree resources
What already exists
A rich tree website landscape exists, but most are one of four things — an inventory map, a forestry-management tool, a scientific occurrence database, or a tree-canopy policy dashboard. Few are focused on curating a the dataset itself as the primary product for others to build on.
Scale figures below are sourced from each site and may be out of date.
| Site | Scope |
|---|---|
| London's Public Realm Trees | Municipal inventory map. Over 1.1M public trees from 30 boroughs plus TfL, the Royal Parks and others; species or genus, tree type, canopy and deprivation overlays, 2090 climate-suitability scores, Street View, and a separate report builder. |
| NYC Tree Map | Municipal inventory map, updated weekly. ~893k trees and 539 species; marker size is DBH and colour is species, and each tree carries inspections, work orders, stewardship, ecological benefits and community activity. |
| OpenTrees.org | Multi-city aggregation — the closest direct precedent for what we are building. 13.9M municipal trees from 192 sources across 19 countries, normalised into a single map. |
| TreeTalk | Consumer product built on inventory data. 850k+ London trees and 1,041 species and varieties from 26 boroughs and estate landowners, turned into circular or A-to-B tree walks, with favourites and stories. |
| Tree Equity Score | Policy dashboard. Neighbourhood scores combining canopy with demographic and environmental variables, plus local analysers that go down to property-level planting scenarios and generate impact reports. |
| Falling Fruit | Purpose-driven aggregation. Imported municipal inventories plus crowdsourcing, mapped worldwide as edible resources, with explicit modelling of unverified records and taxonomy reconciliation. |
| OpenTreeMap | Open-source inventory platform. Tree objects with location, species, size, planting date, photos, ecosystem services, comments and stewardship tasks, editable by community members. |
| PhillyTreeMap | OpenTreeMap at city scale: a participatory inventory of the 13-county Philadelphia region, browsable by species and neighbourhood and open to public contributions. |
| i-Tree Landscape | Forestry analysis tool. Canopy, land cover, demographics, CO₂, pollution and stormwater for US areas, with planting and protection priority scoring. |
| Arnold Arboretum Explorer | Specimen collection. Trees as accessioned scientific objects with provenance and collection history rather than anonymous points, exposed through an interactive map and plant/image search. |
| Kew Garden Explorer | The same specimen model at scale: roughly 60k plantings, 48k accessions and 17k species, searchable by taxonomy and location. |
| Plants of the World Online | Species reference. Taxonomy, synonymy, descriptions, images, native distribution, traits, uses and threat data across ~1.45M names and 514k+ images. Distribution is administrative geography, not occurrences. |
| GBIF | Scientific occurrence database. Research-grade records faceted by geography, year, basis of record and much else, downloadable and aggregable into spatial, temporal and taxonomic cubes. |
| BGCI GlobalTree Portal | Tree-specific global reference. Nearly 60k tree species with native distribution, conservation status and conservation action, viewable by species or by country; sits on top of GlobalTreeSearch. |
| Global Forest Watch | Remote-sensing dashboard. Tree cover, loss and gain, land cover and use, climate, biodiversity, alerts, satellite context and country dashboards — forests as area, not trees as objects. |
| Monumental Trees | Crowdsourced registry of individually notable trees. Girth, height and age measurements repeated over time, with photos and coordinates, across Europe and beyond. |
Where our data comes from
Everything we publish is rebuilt from public endpoints by greenmtnboy/tree_reporting. Nothing here is scraped, licensed from a vendor, or hand-maintained; the list below is the registry the pipeline actually reads, and Datasets carries the same provenance per file.
Municipal inventories
One open-data portal per city, on its own refresh schedule. Where the licence column says not confirmed, we have not verified the portal's terms by hand and would rather say so than guess.
| City | Source | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | SF Open Data — Street Tree List | PDDL |
| New York City | NYC Open Data — 2015 Street Tree Census | Not confirmed |
| Boston | City of Boston Open Data, plus Cambridge, Brookline and the Arnold Arboretum | Not confirmed |
| Burlington, VT | City of Burlington ArcGIS FeatureServer | Not confirmed |
| Washington, DC | Open Data DC — Urban Forestry Street Trees | Not confirmed |
| Los Angeles | LA Open Data — Street Tree Inventory (1990s) | Not confirmed |
| Tempe | City of Tempe Tree Inventory | Not confirmed |
| Vancouver | Vancouver Open Data — public-trees | Open Government Licence – Vancouver |
| London | London Datastore — Public Realm Trees | UK Open Government Licence |
| Paris | Paris Open Data — les-arbres | ODbL |
| Berlin | Berlin GDI WFS — Baumbestand | dl-de/by-2-0 |
| Amsterdam | Amsterdam REST API — bomen/stamgegevens | Not confirmed |
| Melbourne | City of Melbourne — Urban Forest | CC BY 4.0 |
| Buenos Aires | Buenos Aires Data — Arbolado público lineal | Not confirmed |
| Athens | City of Athens — Trees of the National Garden | Not confirmed |
| Milos | No municipal inventory anywhere in Greece's portals — reviewed community submissions plus OpenStreetMap | ODbL (OSM rows) |
| Santorini | As Milos — community submissions plus OpenStreetMap | ODbL (OSM rows) |
Everything else
OpenStreetMap, via Overpass. Every city gets a weekly natural=tree pass over its bounding box, staggered so we are not hammering a volunteer-run API. For Milos and Santorini, where no Greek portal publishes an inventory at all, it backs up community submissions rather than a municipal file. Where an OSM node and a municipal record describe the same tree, the OSM row is flagged rather than dropped. OSM rows are ODbL and that obligation travels with them, which is why the licensing page offers a build with the OSM partition cut out.
Community submissions. Trees added by users.
Species reference data. Utilizes a variety of sources with light human and AI curation. GBIF (taxon match and vernacular names), Plants of the World Online, Wikipedia, and Cal Poly's SelecTreeiNaturalist API provides photos with license maintained.
Ecoregions. RESOLVE Ecoregions, queried from its ArcGIS feature service, gives each city a biome and realm.