Trees in Toronto

Aug 3, 2026·2 min read

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.

A different dataset contains 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. All 688,335 have distinct municipal identifiers, even though 193,559 share a mapped coordinate with another record.

The city records provide data which would be difficult to derive from aerial imagery. A reviewed species can be identified for 640,653 records, while 47,682 are too ambiguous to classify without guessing. Across the full inventory, Norway maple makes up 14.5 percent of the records and honey locust another 8.7 percent. Littleleaf linden, red oak, Colorado blue spruce and Japanese lilac are among the other species recorded across the city.

Most common reviewed species in Toronto's managed street-tree inventory

  1. Norway maple14.5%
  2. Honey locust8.7%
  3. Littleleaf linden4.0%
  4. Colorado blue spruce3.5%
  5. Red oak3.4%
  6. Kentucky coffeetree3.1%
  7. Freeman maple3.1%
  8. Silver maple3.0%
  9. Japanese lilac2.6%
Shares use all 688,335 managed street-tree records; 47,682 could not be assigned a reviewed species.

The aerial layer shows which trees are visible from above. The inventory adds what those dots cannot: a municipal record, a species and other details the City keeps track of. One map shows the trees we can see from imagery; the other shows the trees the City knows about.

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 record. Those shared locations affect how the map can be interpreted, but they do not make the records duplicates. The species chart therefore uses all 688,335 managed records as its denominator. A reviewed taxonomy assigns 640,653 records to a species, while 47,682 remain unresolved rather than being classified by guesswork. Percentages are reproduced at the one-decimal precision of the audited full-inventory analysis.

Sources

  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. 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.