City tree data in Boston: the Parks and Recreation trees dataset
What Boston's open data portal publishes about park and street trees: the 55,227 rows the portal counts on October 8, 2026, how to separate street trees from park trees as the description says, the daily update and the PDDL licence the record names.
Checked against the sources at the bottom of this page on October 8, 2026. Rules, fees and pay change: the source has the last word.
This page describes a public dataset as its portal publishes it. It reports the portal's own description, field list, row counts and licence field as read on October 8, 2026. It does not interpret the numbers. The family overview is on the guide to city open tree data. For another city that uses the same public domain licence, see the San Francisco street tree inventory.
What the dataset is
The dataset is titled BPRD Trees, and the portal lists Boston Maps as the organization that publishes it. The description says it is the Boston Parks and Recreation Department tree list and that it includes both park and street trees. To get street trees only, it says to remove any entries where the park field has a value. It also says the data is updated daily. The package was created on May 28, 2025, and its record shows a last modified time of October 8, 2026.
Rows and fields
The portal's data service returned 55,227 rows for the CSV resource on October 8, 2026, and the ArcGIS service the portal links returned the same count. The portal's own query counted 46,314 rows where the park field is empty, which is the street tree filter the description gives. The fields are an ID, common and botanical species names, number of stems, a diameter range, a diameter in inches rounded to the nearest 0.1 inch, the season planted when known, an open space planning neighborhood, park name and park ID, street address parts, a suffix, a site field and longitude and latitude in EPSG:4326.
The description states that diameter is measured 4.5 feet off the ground and that the range values run from 0 to 3 inches up to more than 30 inches, or N/A. A footnote says the species field is also used to mark empty sites and planned plantings, even though those are not species. The portal's query returned 2,178 rows with the common name Empty Pit/Planting Site. The suffix field marks an assumed address: where it has a value, the description says address information may be incorrect and the coordinates should be used instead. The query counted 1,343 rows with a suffix value.
What the counts show
The most frequent common names were honeylocust with 6,513 rows, littleleaf linden with 3,526, Norway maple with 3,158, red maple with 2,857 and pin oak with 2,362. By neighborhood, Dorchester had the most rows with 7,542, followed by West Roxbury with 4,849, Allston-Brighton with 4,562 and Roxbury with 4,237. These are row counts in the portal, not a statement about how many trees stand in the city.
Licence
The package record's licence field reads Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) and links the Open Definition page for that licence. The Open Data Commons text for the licence says recipients may use the work for any purpose, including commercial use.
Sources
- City of Boston, BPRD Trees (open data package record), read October 8, 2026
- City of Boston, BPRD Trees (data service record count), read October 8, 2026
- City of Boston, BPRD Trees (ArcGIS service record count), read October 8, 2026
- Open Data Commons, Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) v1.0, read October 8, 2026