Democratising urban tree data

Over the past decade, the OU - led by Dr Philip Wheeler, OU Senior Lecturer in Ecology has been developing Treezilla, the largest public tree map in the UK amassing over a million records. But this is just a fraction of the more than 150 million individual street, park, and garden trees.

Trees play a vital role in our urban landscapes, reducing flood risk and temperatures, improving air quality, and storing carbon. But the environments in which they grow can be challenging due to poor soils, air quality, and restricted space. We need to understand urban trees so that we can best manage them for society’s benefit. But the small amounts of data that do exist are held privately by local authorities.

Tens of millions of tree records are sitting in local authority tree inventories; we will combine these datasets into one unified database, enabling the first large-scale analyses of risks to our urban trees. The data will also be made accessible through Treezilla, so the public can learn about the trees around them.

The OU will be working with Forest Research – Great Britain’s principal organisation for forestry and tree-related research, bringing expertise in data management as we clean, tidy, and standardise the data before publishing it for public and research use.

Funding is required to support an open data specialist who will work with more than 400 local authorities, aiming to collate more than 15 million tree records and build the world’s largest tree database.

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Get in touch

Email Gillian Hosier or call on 01908 858285 to discuss this project