Where the data comes from
Every tree on these plates comes from the City of Saint Paul's public tree inventory, maintained by Saint Paul Parks & Recreation's forestry staff. It covers the trees the city itself manages — boulevard (street) trees and park trees — not trees on private property.
The city does not currently publish this inventory as open data, so we obtained it through a Data Practices request (Minnesota's public-records process). The city provided a full export as an Esri shapefile, received on ….
- Snapshot cut by the city
- …
- Received by this project
- …
- Records in the export
- …
- Newest edit in the export
- …
How fresh is it?
We know when the city sent the file; the more interesting question is how stale the export was at that moment. The raw file answers this itself, three ways:
- The export was cut on … — the shapefile's own header records the day it was last written.
- It was current that same day. The newest inspection date on any record is … — the very day the export was cut — so the snapshot came from a live database, not an old dump.
- The inventory is actively maintained. The export contains inspections recorded in every month of … up to the cut date, and … trees already marked as planted that year. Roughly of all records were re-inspected within the two years before the export.
What we don't know is how often the city's own database is refreshed from field work, or how quickly a newly planted or removed tree shows up in it. And this site is a static snapshot: anything the city has changed since … is not reflected here until we request a fresh export.
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, ward, and location — and drops records without usable coordinates. 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 export 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, and any errors introduced in processing or presentation are ours, not the city's. If you spot something wrong — or you work with this data at the city and can tell us more about how it's maintained — we'd genuinely like to hear about it: write to hello@msptrees.com.