MSP Trees went live on with one city’s trees and has grown from there. This page lists each release: what it added, and the day it reached the site. The version number in the footer of every page is the release you are looking at. Its first number changes when what the map is changes — a new city, a new way of seeing the trees — the second when a feature or a fresher inventory arrives, and the third for fixes.
To hear about releases as they happen, there is ; to see where each city’s data comes from, About the Data; for who built the site and why, About.
2.4.0 Who built this, and why
- An About page with a person on it. The map now says who made it. About is a short note from Bryan Kennedy, the Saint Paul resident behind the site, on why he built it and what he does the rest of the time, with a link to his consulting work at bryankennedy.org.
- The data page has moved. Where each city’s inventory comes from, how fresh it is and which cities are not on the map yet now lives at The data. Old links to the about page’s sections carry over to the new address.
- A fourth tab, and a name in every footer. The header now reads Map, Species index, The data and About on every page, and the footer credits the site’s maker.
2.3.1 The newsletter in new colors
- A familiar face in your inbox. The email that confirms your newsletter sign-up now opens with the MSP Trees mark and the band of colors from the top of the site, so you can tell it came from us at a glance.
2.3.0 A new tree for MSP Trees
- A logo of our own. MSP Trees has a mark: a mosaic tree pieced together in the greens, salmons, mustards and blues of the canopy it maps. It heads every page beside the site’s name, signs the footer, and is the icon in your browser tab and on your home screen.
- A brighter frame. The page tabs, the color-by switch and the newsletter buttons take the deep green of the mark’s branches, and a thin band of the mark’s colors underlines the header.
- A new card when you share. A link to the map posted to social media or a chat now unfurls with the new mark.
2.2.6 Cards that announce themselves
- Screen readers hear the card. Tapping a tree or a hexagon used to open its card in silence for anyone using a screen reader. Focus now moves to the card’s heading when it opens, so the reader announces the tree or the area summary and can read on, and closing the card returns focus to the map.
- Edges you can see. The outline around each button, the search box, the page tabs and the newsletter field is a shade darker, and the ring that shows which control has keyboard focus is now ink rather than blue, so both are visible against the paper for readers with low vision.
- More map on a phone. The panel under the map now takes only the room its legend needs instead of a fixed share of the screen, so a taller phone gets the difference back as map.
2.2.5 The species index on a phone
- It scrolls like a page. On a phone the species index, the data page and this page now scroll the way any article does, so the browser’s address bar tucks away as you read and pull-to-refresh works. On a laptop nothing changes.
- A readable chart. The abundance histogram is drawn for the width of your screen, so its axis labels are legible on a phone instead of a smear.
- A tidier tally. The table’s columns make room for the species name on a phone, with the Latin name on its own line, and the column headings now stay flush with the top as you scroll instead of letting rows peek above them.
2.2.4 A clearer map on a phone
- The map credits start folded. On a phone the line of map credits used to open across the bottom of the map, over the Locate me button and the scale bar. It now starts as a small “i” in the corner; tap it to read the credits.
- Steadier scrolling. Scrolling the panel under the map to its end no longer tugs the page along with it.
- Less motion when you ask for it. With your phone or computer set to reduce motion, the map’s notices and loading pill appear in place instead of sliding in, and the map jumps rather than glides, except when you search for an address.
2.2.3 Bigger buttons on the map
- Easier to hit with a thumb. On a phone, the zoom, find-me and attribution buttons on the map are now 44 pixels square, up from 29 and 24. Nothing else about them changed; the address box makes a little room for the wider column.
- A bigger close button. The × that dismisses a tree or area card (and the newsletter box) answers to a 44-pixel square now, not just the glyph.
- A legend that fits. On a phone the key under the map no longer scrolls: it shows the genera that fit the panel and says how many more are in view. Turn the phone sideways and the “tap a hexagon” hint steps aside so the key keeps a row.
2.2.2 More room for the map
- A shorter header. The heading at the top of every page took four stacked lines; it now takes two, with the page links moved up beside the site name as a row of tabs, and each plate’s description running on from its title. On a laptop the map gains about half the header’s old height, and a phone gets a little back too.
2.2.1 This page
- A release history. The version number in every footer now links here, and About the Data points this way too. Versions before today were numbered after the fact, from the dates each change reached the site; the footer had read v0.1 from launch until the last week of September.
2.2.0 Columbia Heights, and a fresher Minneapolis
- Columbia Heights joins the map — about 4,700 street and park trees from the city’s public inventory, and the first Anoka County city on the map. Its addresses are searchable like everyone else’s.
- Minneapolis is nine years fresher. The city’s trees are now drawn from the Park Board’s June 2021 inventory — about 213,000 trees — published as open research data by the University of Minnesota’s MSP Long Term Ecological Research program, in place of the 2012 open-data export we launched with. The ash trees removed after emerald ash borer are gone from the map, as they are from the boulevards.
- About the Data, rewritten in two halves. The west metro and the east metro each get their sources and a county-by-county ledger of which of the metro’s cities are on the map and which are not yet. Every city in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area is the goal.
- A compass on the location dot. On a phone, after Locate me, an arrow shows which way you are facing — from the browser’s own sensors, no app needed.
- Altogether: about 385,000 trees and planting sites across four communities.
2.1.0 The newsletter
- An occasional newsletter. Sign up from any footer or from About the Data; we confirm your address by email first, and every issue has a one-click unsubscribe. A few emails a year, when a city is added or an inventory refreshed.
- A quiet invitation. After you have explored the map for a while, a small card in the corner offers the newsletter once, and only once per visit.
- Phone fixes. The map keeps clear of the notch and home bar on newer phones, and the page links are easier to tap.
- Behind the scenes, the project’s code and its automatic deploys moved to a self-hosted setup. Nothing visible changed.
2.0.0 Minneapolis joins — every tree, on every device
- Minneapolis. The Park Board’s open-data inventory (its 2012 export, about 175,000 trees) joins Saint Paul’s, and the map becomes a map of the Twin Cities: 342,000 trees and planting sites across three cities.
- South St. Paul. The boulevard trees Tree Trust planted there in 2024 and 2025 — the first suburb on the map.
- Address search. Type an address and the map jumps to that block, for any city on the map.
- Every tree, on every device. Street-level dots now stream in small tiles for just the area on screen, instead of one citywide download. Phones show every tree where they used to show a sample, and the long wait on desktop is gone.
- One name for each tree. Every city records species its own way; all are now resolved to one shared list keyed on the scientific name, so the same species is named and colored the same wherever it was recorded. Common name first (Pin Oak), scientific name alongside (Quercus palustris).
- Dots sized by trunk girth, so the old oaks read as old oaks at a glance.
- Parks on the base map. Parks, cemeteries, industrial land, rail yards and airfields are drawn on the vellum for way-finding.
1.2.0 Tree condition, and a name
- The site becomes MSP Trees — Our Twin Cities Public Forest, ahead of the second city. It had launched as Saint Paul Boulevard Trees.
- A condition view. The overview map can now be colored by the trees’ recorded condition instead of their dominant genus, with a switch in the sidebar.
- Small courtesies. The tree or hexagon you tapped stays marked, a small pill shows while trees stream in after a zoom, the site has an icon and can be added to a phone’s home screen, and links shared to social media get a proper card.
1.1.0 About the Data
- A new page, About the Data: where the inventory came from (a Minnesota Data Practices request), how current it is, what we keep and what we drop, and how to reach us at [email protected].
- Smoother reading. Hexagons linger as you zoom toward the trees, the sidebar key covers only the hexagons in view, and the details card floats over the map and steps aside when you move on.
- Better on phones. A compact header, the genus legend within reach, a details panel that grows to fit the tree you tapped, and the citywide point set no longer downloads until you are close enough to need it.
1.0.0 Launch: Saint Paul’s boulevard trees
- msptrees.com goes live with 167,191 boulevard trees and planting sites from the City of Saint Paul’s forestry inventory, current to May 2026.
- Two ways to read the forest. A citywide overview of the dominant genus in each hexagon, and, as you zoom in, every individual tree. Tap one for its species, condition, trunk size and the year it was planted.
- Locate me. Jump to your own block, with a hand for granting location permission on iPhone and desktop.
- Bigger dots and finger-forgiving taps on phones.
Before launch
Work began with Saint Paul’s inventory in a desktop mapping tool and a first web viewer: a dot map, a heat map, and the hexagon overview that became the home page.