January 31, 2026
Branching out online
Opentrees.org (2024)
The world’s tree map is here—and people are getting sappy
TLDR: OpenTrees.org maps city street and park trees using public data you can click to explore. Commenters cheered, linked Falling Fruit, swooned over Melbourne’s “email a tree” love letters, and urged more cities to open their data so the map grows and urban forests get better care.
OpenTrees.org just dropped the internet’s biggest tree map, and the crowd went full wholesome. Fans lined up to hug the screen: “Fabulous, thanks!” cheered one, while another immediately compared it to the fruit-finder cult classic Falling Fruit. The site pulls city open data to show street and park trees—click a dot, learn a tree—and yes, some dots are grey because not every city shares species info. Cue gentle nitpicks and helpful tips, not a flame war: readers swapped ideas on getting their city’s data published and cheered the DIY spirit baked into the FAQ.
The breakout meme? Emailing trees. A commenter dropped Melbourne’s delightful project where locals literally send love letters to trees (proof and news), and everyone collectively swooned. The mood: civic tech that actually feels human. No blockchain, no buzzwords—just shade, pruning schedules, and canopy planning explained in plain English. Some readers want crowd power too, nodding to iNaturalist and community-maintained lists. Others just want to stroll their neighborhood with a phone and finally learn the name of That One Tree. Verdict from the comments: map good, trees better, feelings strongest. Also, someone said “Glad to see this,” which is comment-section code for “ship it.”
Key Points
- •OpenTrees.org aggregates open municipal datasets to map street and park trees and claims to be the world’s largest such database.
- •Municipal tree data supports planting decisions, risk management, maintenance scheduling, and long-term canopy planning.
- •Data gaps exist due to limited scope (e.g., significant trees only), governance boundaries, focus areas (parks vs. streets), and outdated surveys.
- •Some sources lack species data (rendered as grey), and family taxonomy is incomplete due to reliance on an Australia-focused source.
- •The project evolved from Postgres/TileMill (2015) to Mapbox-GL-JS (2018) to VueJS (2020); code is on GitHub and it’s built by Steve Bennett in Melbourne.