jhumbl/gla-trees

London public realm trees (GLA / GiGL)

Tree-level inventory of London's publicly maintained realm — around 1.14 million street, park and other public-land trees — collated by Greenspace Information for Greater London (GiGL) for the Greater London Authority from the boroughs, TfL, the Royal Parks and other public land managers, with species, location type, size and age where recorded, and a 2090 climate suitability score. One publisher, one Open Government Licence, one occasional edition cycle and one set of coverage caveats — that is what makes it one family.

Curated by uk-open-data: a weekly pipeline re-downloads each publisher file, tidies it into analysis-ready parquet, validates it against a declared schema, and uploads it here. main is always the latest data; a git tag archive-YYYY-MM snapshots every month, so silent revisions by the publisher stay visible. The raw file as published is stored alongside every tidy parquet.

How to use

Files are served with CORS and HTTP range support (verified on every pipeline run), so browsers can query them directly — DuckDB-Wasm, or plain fetch():

latest:    https://huggingface.co/datasets/jhumbl/gla-trees/resolve/main/<filename>
snapshot:  https://huggingface.co/datasets/jhumbl/gla-trees/resolve/archive-YYYY-MM/<filename>
duckdb:    hf://datasets/jhumbl/gla-trees/<filename>

SELECT * FROM 'hf://datasets/jhumbl/gla-trees/gla_public_realm_trees.parquet' LIMIT 10;

London Public Realm Trees: location, species and climate suitability of ~1.14m publicly maintained trees

Tree-level inventory of London's public realm — street trees, park trees and some school and housing-land trees — collated by Greenspace Information for Greater London (GiGL) for the Greater London Authority from all 32 boroughs, the City of London, Transport for London, the Royal Parks, the London Legacy Development Corporation and Quintain (Wembley Park). Each row is one tree: coordinates, taxonomy, maintainer, location type, size and age where recorded, and a composite 2090 climate suitability score. This is the dataset behind the GLA's London Public Realm Tree Map.

• Provider: GLA / GiGL
• Update cadence: Occasional: editions were published in 2018, 2021 and November 2025, so years can pass between updates. The weekly pipeline run re-checks the London Datastore API each Monday and picks up a new edition automatically; almost every run will report the files unchanged, which is normal.
• Homepage: https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/local-authority-maintained-trees/
• Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0
• Source: Greater London Authority (GLA Environment Team) / Greenspace Information for Greater London (GiGL) — London Public Realm Trees, London Datastore; GLA — Future Climate Suitability of London's Public Realm Trees (source of the 2090 climate suitability score)

Files

• gla_public_realm_trees.csv — The unmodified CSV of the newest edition as published on the London Datastore (UTF-8 with BOM), renamed to this repo's stable filename.
• gla_public_realm_trees.parquet — Typed copy of the raw CSV, one row per tree: coordinates and uniqueid typed, whitespace trimmed, empty cells nulled, rows sorted by borough then uniqueid. Column names and categorical/size text are exactly as published. May be absent if the published layout changed; the raw CSV is authoritative.

Columns of gla_public_realm_trees.parquet

column	type	description
borough	string	London borough the tree is located in (e.g. Westminster, City of London). Null for a handful of rows the publisher left blank.
lat	number	Latitude, WGS84 decimal degrees.
lon	number	Longitude, WGS84 decimal degrees.
uniqueid	integer	Row identifier assigned by the publisher; unique within the 2025 edition. Not guaranteed stable between editions.
taxon_species	string	Scientific name as supplied — usually species (e.g. 'Acer campestre') but genus-only where the supplier recorded no species.
common_name	string	Common name matching taxon_species (e.g. 'Field maple').
taxon_genus	string	Scientific genus (e.g. 'Acer').
common_genus	string	Common name of the genus (e.g. 'Maple'), or the publisher's literal 'NA' string (~37% of rows).
gla_name	string	The GLA's display grouping for the tree map (usually the common genus).
taxon_family	string	Scientific family (e.g. 'Sapindaceae').
maintainer	string	Organisation that maintains the tree (e.g. 'City of Westminster', 'The Royal Parks', 'Transport for London'). Can differ from borough near boundaries.
location	string	Tree location type: Highways, Parks, Housing, Other, or Outside London.
climate_suitability	string	Composite 2090 climate suitability of the species: High, Moderate, Low, Vulnerable, or 'Not provided'.
cs_confidence	string	Confidence of the climate suitability assessment: High, Low, or 'Not provided'.
age_cat	string	Age category as supplied: Young (0-15), Early mature (16-30), Mature (31-80), Over mature (81-150), Veteran (over 150), Undefined, or 'Not provided'.
canopy_m	string	Canopy spread in metres, AS PUBLISHED: exact ('8 m'), banded ('05 to 10 m', '<3 m', '20+ m') or 'Not recorded'. String — parse before computing.
height_m	string	Tree height in metres, AS PUBLISHED: exact ('12 m'), banded ('10 to 15 m', '<5 m', '20+ m') or 'Not recorded'. String — parse before computing.
girth_dbh	string	Girth (diameter at breast height) in centimetres, AS PUBLISHED: exact ('32 cm'), banded ('21 to 35 cm', 'Up to 15 cm') or 'Not recorded'. String — parse before computing.

Caveats

• This is NOT London's whole urban forest. The GLA's i-Tree report estimates 8+ million trees in London; this dataset covers the ~1.14 million in the publicly maintained realm (highways, parks, some school and housing land). Woodlands, private gardens and most other private land are out of scope.
• Borough totals reflect the data each organisation supplied, not the real tree stock — coverage and recording practice vary widely (Croydon supplied ~1,200 records, Enfield ~110,000). Do not compare borough counts as if they measured trees on the ground.
• Where an organisation did not supply updated data for an edition, the GLA carries its previous records forward (e.g. Bromley in the 2025 edition), so individual records can be years older than the edition date.
• The size columns (canopy_m, height_m, girth_dbh) are kept as published: a mix of exact values ('8 m'), banded ranges ('05 to 10 m', '<5 m', '20+ m' — band edges differ by supplier) and the sentinel 'Not recorded'. They are strings, not numbers, and need consumer-side parsing.
• Columns keep the publisher's sentinels as text: 'Not provided' (climate_suitability, cs_confidence, age_cat), 'Undefined' (age_cat) and a literal 'NA' string in the taxonomy columns (~420,000 rows in common_genus, fewer in taxon_genus and taxon_family). Empty cells (e.g. 36 rows with no borough) are nulls.
• The 2090 climate suitability score is a composite assessment of each species against projected 2090 London climate conditions, from the GLA's Future Climate Suitability report; it is species-level, not an assessment of the individual tree.
• taxon_species is not always species-level — some suppliers record genus only (e.g. 'Acer'), and the borough/maintainer columns can disagree near borough boundaries (a tree listed under one borough may be maintained by a neighbouring authority).
• Only the current edition is republished here. Older editions (February 2018, July 2021) remain downloadable from the London Datastore page, and past states of this repo's files are kept by the monthly archive-YYYY-MM tags.