Opentrees.org (2024)
opentrees.org
opentrees.org
We're around 31M trees now
Hyde Park shows as an empty space. Hyde Park does contain trees, but the park is administered by the Royal Parks Commission, which is controlled by central government, not by the Greater London Assembly directly or indirectly.
And in South West London there is a large expanse where the only trees are along the A23 road which goes from South London to Brighton. I presume that the local (borough) authority doesn't collect tree data here. But that road, like many large through roads, is controlled by Transport for London, not the borough.
You can also see a huge drop-off in tree density going from Newham and Waltham Forest to Redbridge in the East. Since Redbridge is pretty leafy, there's obviously a significant difference in how trees are reported. It looks like maybe street maintenance in Redbridge just records one data point per segment of a road that has trees. So work or damage for all trees along Foo Road between the corner of Bar Road and the intersection with Asdf Street gets put under the same GPS location. Or they just misunderstood the assignment when passing their data to the GLA.
The City of London has noticeably fewer trees than neighbouring boroughs (except Hackney). But I think this might be that there are genuinely fewer trees as there are skyscrapers and no real residential streets.
The parks outside of the City of London which are controlled by the City Corporation also don't have trees shown on the map (eg West Ham Park and Wanstead Flats in Newham - council controlled Plashet Park has trees shown). Slightly ironic as these parks are well known for having much better maintenance than the borough controlled parks in the same areas.
The Isle of Dogs on the other hand, I think has more trees than are featured. Looks like we see Tower Hamlets trees but not trees which are privately managed as part of the Canary Wharf estates?
Yeah, there's a lot of interesting administrative quirks like that throughout the database. And there are kind of interesting details about exactly which types of trees are catalogued. Generally the data I've been finding and incorporating is where every tree has been individually planted, managed, catalogued.
There also occasionally exist data about natural bushland that has also been audited, but sometimes also bushland that has been sort of described in aggregate.
And then there are datasets of significant trees only (as opposed to every tree within a given park/roadside...).
I wish there were datasets of trees on private land too - they'd be much more useful for ecology etc.
Apparently they get a lot, even more than 12 years later: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-21/tree-love-letters-for...
For what it’s worth, when it was posted here before, I raised an issue with a link to an additional data source as requested, and it’s still open five years later. I don’t think this is actively maintained.
I turn to https://calscape.org a lot for inspiration and information on plants and trees to plant in my California garden.
Is it "dead"? Hmm. It's complicated. It's true the data hasn't been updated in a long time. The biggest issue is that most of the data sources that were present on OpenTrees are no longer online.
So if I do a fresh harvest and rebuild, a lot of that data will disappear, which is a bit sad.
I'm in two minds about what to do, and have been for a long time.
So, it's not "dead", it's just very indecisive.
Could also be cool to try to somehow load some of this data into OpenStreetMap -- then if the sources go away, local mappers can potentially pick up the torch.