Saint Paul
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Where the data comes from
These plates draw the two Twin Cities' public tree inventories together — Saint Paul and Minneapolis — for … trees and planting sites in all. Each is a city-maintained inventory of the trees the city itself manages: boulevard (street) trees and park trees, not trees on private property. We normalize both into one shared species and condition scheme (see the species index) so the same tree is named and colored the same way no matter which city recorded it.
Saint Paul does not publish its inventory as open data, so we obtained it through a Data Practices request (Minnesota's public-records process); the city provided a full Esri shapefile export. Minneapolis publishes its inventory openly through Open Data Minneapolis, so we downloaded it directly.
How current is each city?
The two inventories are not the same age, and that matters when you read the map. Saint Paul's is a live, actively-maintained export; Minneapolis's is an older published snapshot.
- Saint Paul was current the day it was cut. The export is dated …, and the newest inspection on any record is … — the very same day — so it came from a live database, not an old dump. Roughly of records were re-inspected within the two years before the export, and … trees were already logged as planted in ….
- Minneapolis is a 2012 inventory. The city's open-data record states it was extracted from its forestry (Davey) database on …, and that is the most recent full tree-by-tree inventory Minneapolis publishes openly — the Park Board's newer data is summary tables and planting records, not a fresh per-tree file. Treat these trees as a historical baseline: many have since grown, been removed, or been replanted. We'll swap in a newer inventory the moment the city publishes one.
This site is a static snapshot of each source. Anything either city has changed since its export is not reflected here until we obtain a fresh one.
Growing across the Twin Cities
The two big cities are just the start. We're adding suburban and metro communities as they share their own public tree data, normalized into the same species and condition scheme and drawn right alongside Saint Paul and Minneapolis:
We're actively looking for more of the Twin Cities metro — if your city or suburb keeps a public tree inventory, or you know where one lives, tell us at [email protected] and we'll work to add it.
What this site does with it
The pipeline (open source, in the project repository) keeps a slim set of fields per record — species, condition, trunk diameter, year planted, and location — and drops records without usable coordinates. Every city records species differently, so each is resolved to one shared taxonomy keyed on the scientific name: a tree is given its common name (for example Pin Oak) with the scientific name (Quercus palustris) alongside, so the same species from either city collapses to a single entry. Inventory rows that are not living trees (vacant planting sites, stumps, do-not-plant flags) are kept but drawn as placeholders and tallied separately on the species index. Field staff names present in the raw exports are not published.
Base map roads come from the MetroGIS road centerlines dataset via the Minnesota Geospatial Commons; map tiles are rendered by OpenFreeMap from OpenStreetMap data.
Caveats
This is an independent project, not a product of the City of Saint Paul, the City of Minneapolis, or the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board, and any errors introduced in processing or presentation are ours, not theirs. Keep in mind that the two cities' inventories are of different vintages — Saint Paul's is current to 2026, Minneapolis's is a 2012 snapshot — so comparisons between them should allow for that gap. If you spot something wrong — or you work with this data at either city and can tell us more about how it's maintained — we'd genuinely like to hear about it: write to [email protected].