Plate III. Sources — About the Data The Data

The whole metro is the goal

The Minneapolis–Saint Paul–Bloomington metropolitan area spans … counties in Minnesota and Wisconsin and … cities. … of them are on the map today. The ledgers above name the rest so the gaps are plain: every city that keeps a public tree inventory belongs here, and the ones that don’t keep one yet are a conversation we’d like to start.

If your city keeps a public tree inventory — as a GIS layer, a spreadsheet, a contractor’s database export — or you know where one lives, tell us at [email protected] and we’ll work to add it. Where a city publishes a live layer rather than a dated export, the date shown on its card is the day we took our snapshot.

How current is each city?

The inventories are not the same age, and that matters when you read the map. Saint Paul’s is a live export current to the day it was cut; Minneapolis’s is a 2021 snapshot published by university researchers; the suburbs carry the date we last read their sources.

• 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 June 2021 inventory. The Park Board’s per-tree data reached us through the University of Minnesota’s MSP Long Term Ecological Research program, which compiled the Board’s inventory into an open research dataset; the newest inspection in that export is …. It post-dates the city’s emerald ash borer removals, so the ash trees that dominated older maps are largely gone from it. It carries each tree’s species, size, condition and land type but no per-tree dates or street addresses, so the address on a Minneapolis specimen card comes from the City’s 2012 open-data export, matched to the same site. The most recent full inventory the Park Board publishes itself is still that 2012 export; we’ll swap in a fresher one the moment one appears.

This site is a static snapshot of each source. Anything a city has changed since its export is not reflected here until we obtain a fresh one.

What this site does with it

The pipeline 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 any 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. Address search uses the counties’ open address points: Ramsey County for Saint Paul, Hennepin County for Minneapolis and Anoka County for Columbia Heights.

Newsletter

The map changes as the cities’ inventories do: new plantings, removals, fresh condition surveys, and whole new cities as more of the metro’s public trees come into view. An occasional newsletter is the easiest way to follow along.

Credits and caveats

The data is the work of the City of Saint Paul’s Parks & Recreation Forestry unit; the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board, whose 2021 inventory is published by the University of Minnesota’s MSP Long Term Ecological Research program (Keller, Brandt, Cavender-Bares, Knight and Hobbie, Minneapolis-St. Paul Urban Tree Inventory, Environmental Data Initiative, CC-BY 4.0); the City of Columbia Heights Public Works department; and Tree Trust with the City of South St. Paul. Street addresses come from Ramsey, Hennepin and Anoka counties’ open address data.

This is an independent project (who made it, and why), not a product of any of those cities, boards, counties or programs, and any errors introduced in processing or presentation are ours, not theirs. Keep in mind that the inventories are of different vintages — Saint Paul’s is current to 2026, Minneapolis’s is a June 2021 snapshot, and each suburb’s card carries its own date — so comparisons between them should allow for that gap. If you spot something wrong — or you work with this data at any of these cities and can tell us more about how it’s maintained — we’d genuinely like to hear about it: write to [email protected].