Trees in Toronto

I wanted to see what Toronto would look like if I took away the roads, buildings, basemap, and left only the trees. The City's topographic tree layer, derived from aerial imagery, contains 1,249,665 points marking visible-tree locations. Draw them all at once and the city appears anyway: street grids, ravines, parks and the waterfront emerge from the spaces between the marks.

A city drawn by 1,249,665 tree points

Every point is a visible-tree location identified from aerial imagery.1

The map works because trees do not land randomly across a city. They follow residential streets, gather in parks and trace the valleys that interrupt Toronto's grid. Where the marks thin out, other parts of the built environment become visible by their absence.

Being derived from aerial imagery, the points only provide geospatial data and not a complete census. An empty patch does not prove there are no trees there. A point does not say what kind of tree it represents, who owns it, how healthy it is or when anyone last inspected it.

To improve that, we look at another dataset containing 688,335 managed street-tree records. The Street Tree Data layer is an asset inventory: trees with a civic address, ward, botanical and common names, trunk measurement and municipal identifier. Plot those record locations on top of the same point cloud, and the trees the City keeps track of light up.

The trees Toronto keeps track of

mapped visible treesmanaged street-tree records
Highlighted locations come from the Street Tree Data dataset2, compared against the point cloud from the Topographic Mapping—Physical Location of Trees dataset1.

These are two different datasets, not a matched set of trees across both. The first shows what data can be gathered from aerial imagery. The second records trees that are in municipal inventory. Some managed records have precise physical locations; others are geocoded to an address or parcel.

The city records provide data which would be difficult to derive from aerial imagery. After excluding records with duplicate coordinates and setting aside those without an identifiable species, 466,744 records remain across 185 species. Within that coordinate-filtered subset, Norway maple makes up 17.54 percent of those trees and honey locust another 9.85 percent. Littleleaf linden, red oak, Colorado blue spruce and Japanese lilac are among the other species planted across the city.

Most common identified street-tree species at unshared mapped coordinates

  1. Norway maple17.54%
  2. Honey locust9.85%
  3. Littleleaf linden5.07%
  4. Red oak3.63%
  5. Colorado blue spruce3.27%
  6. Japanese lilac3.23%
  7. Freeman maple3.20%
  8. Silver maple3.19%
  9. Kentucky coffeetree2.92%
  10. Ginkgo2.79%
  11. Sargent apple2.76%
  12. Sugar maple2.06%
Among identified records at unshared coordinates, the remaining 173 species account for 40.50%.

Knowing where a tree is and what species it belongs to is only the beginning. Toronto's street-tree planting guide explains that each tree needs to suit its growing conditions, its eventual size and nearby infrastructure such as overhead wires. The public inventory does not record those decisions, but its locations, species names and trunk measurements show some of the information the City keeps for its street trees.

Then comes the work of looking after hundreds of thousands of trees. The City says crews work neighbourhood by neighbourhood, inspecting street trees and aiming to prune each City-owned tree roughly once every seven years. Other work begins with a 311 report or an urgent safety issue.

There is more hiding in Toronto's open data. This felt like a good place to start.

How the maps were madeTwo independently sourced point layers, one shared projection and no attempt to match individual trees.

The topographic map preserves all 1,249,665 published visible-tree points. The managed layer plots all 688,335 published street-tree record locations on the same extent and rotates both layers 17 degrees clockwise to follow Toronto's long axis. The CN Tower is included only as an orientation marker.

The inventories describe different populations and have unknown overlap. Managed coordinates mix physical tree locations with address or parcel geocodes, and repeated coordinates are possible. Neither layer is a complete tree census, and neither supports conclusions about missing trees, canopy area, tree age or individual-tree health.

Every managed record has a distinct municipal tree identifier, but 193,559 records share a mapped coordinate with another tree. The species chart excludes those ambiguous coordinate stacks and then excludes records without a confidently reviewed species, leaving 466,744 records at unshared mapped coordinates. This coordinate-filtered subset is not the species distribution of the complete inventory, and a unique coordinate does not prove that the tree was individually surveyed.

Sources and further reading

  1. City of Toronto Open Data. Topographic Mapping—Physical Location of Trees

    Source for the 1,249,665-point topographic layer; retrieved August 2, 2026.

  2. City of Toronto Open Data. Street Tree Data

    Source for the 688,335 managed street-tree records; retrieved August 2, 2026.

  3. City of Toronto. City-Owned Tree Maintenance

    Ownership, inspection, pruning, reactive service and Area Street Tree Maintenance.

  4. City of Toronto. Species Planted on Streets

    The City's public guide to species selection and planting conditions.

  5. University of Toronto School of Cities. A dot map of Toronto's trees

    Reference for visualizing Toronto's tree locations as a citywide point cloud.