City tree data in Brisbane: the street tree species and precinct datasets
What Brisbane City Council's open data portal publishes about street trees: a species list of 167 rows and a precinct map of 8,606 polygons, both under CC BY 4.0, and the fact that a title search on the portal found no tree-by-tree inventory.
Checked against the sources at the bottom of this page on October 10, 2026. Rules, fees and pay change: the source has the last word.
This page describes public datasets as the portal publishes them. It reports the portal's own descriptions, field lists, counts and licence labels as read on October 10, 2026, and it does not interpret the numbers. The family overview is on the guide to city open tree data. For a city that does publish one row per tree, see the Columbus public trees layer.
What the portal holds
The portal's catalogue search on dataset titles for the words trees, canopy, vegetation and street tree returned 13 datasets. None is titled as an inventory of individual trees. The street tree entries are Street Tree Species, with 167 records, and Street Tree Landscape Character Precincts, with 8,606 records. The others are a significant landscape tree overlay of 1,740 records, protected vegetation layers under the Natural Assets Local Law 2003 and regional ecosystem layers, plus flood study entries that only share the word tree with a creek name.
The species dataset
The Street Tree Species record is published by Brisbane City Council and shows a last modified date of June 9, 2026. Its description says the council identified landscape character precincts and a range of street tree species that are good performers in the street, low maintenance and climate resilient. The fields are a precinct, botanical name, common name, flower, flowering season, minimum and maximum tree height in metres, crown width, three verge width columns, an under powerlines column, a power line height column, a bus stop column and a limitations column. By precinct the 167 rows split into Riparian with 34, Higher land with 29, Undulating Plains with 28, Arterial road medians and roundabouts with 25, Arterial road verges with 22, Coastal with 22 and Wetlands with 7. The under powerlines column reads Yes on 45 rows and No on 122.
The precinct dataset
The precinct record shows a last modified date of September 3, 2026. Its description names six precinct types: coastal, wetlands, riparian, undulating plains, higher land and arterial roads, and says motorways and water bodies are excluded. The fields are an object ID, precinct, shape area, shape length and two geometry columns. By precinct the 8,606 polygons split into Arterial Road with 4,561, Undulating Plains with 2,241, Excluded with 918, Riparian with 424, Higher Land with 313, Coastal with 140 and Wetlands with 9. These are polygon counts, not tree counts.
Licence
Both records name the licence as CC BY 4.0. The Creative Commons deed says the material may be shared and adapted for any purpose, even commercially, that appropriate credit with a link to the licence and a note of any changes is required, and that the licensor cannot revoke these freedoms while the terms are followed.
Sources
- Brisbane City Council, open data catalogue search for tree and vegetation titles, read October 10, 2026
- Brisbane City Council, Street Tree Species (open data record), read October 10, 2026
- Brisbane City Council, Street Tree Landscape Character Precincts (open data record), read October 10, 2026
- Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International deed, read October 10, 2026