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City tree data in Christchurch: the OpenData Tree service

What Christchurch City Council publishes about its trees: the Tree layer in its OpenData map service with 182,855 points on October 10, 2026, its 32 fields, the service status, ownership, age class and species counts, and the copyright line the service carries.

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 a public dataset as its publisher lists it. It reports the service description, field list and counts 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 another New Zealand council file, see the Wellington WCC Trees layer.

What the dataset is

The layer is named Tree and sits in the OpenData folder of the council's map server. The service description says it contains Tree data within the territorial local authority area of Christchurch City Council, New Zealand, and its keywords are Service and Tree. It is a point layer in the New Zealand Transverse Mercator coordinate system, offered as both a map service and a feature service, and the feature service lists query and extract as its capabilities with exports to file geodatabase, shapefile, CSV, GeoJSON and SQLite. The server returns up to 2,000 features per request. A count query returned 182,855 points on October 10, 2026. The layer definition carries no description text, and the service definition gives no creation or modified date.

Fields

The layer lists 32 fields. They include a tree identifier, service status, ownership, location certainty, age class, protection, target frequency, and a series of botanical fields: species, genus, hybrid and rare flags, common name, botanic name, variety, cultivar and sub-species. There are also an accession number, planted and observation dates, diameter at breast height, height, crown spread, a long asset description, a comment, a site name, a photo field, reference numbers for the council's asset systems and a contractor, and created and last edited dates.

What the counts show

By the service status field, 127,497 rows read Current, 48,203 Removed, 4,443 Defects Liability, 2,658 Stump and 54 Special tree, so the layer holds removed trees as well as standing ones. By the ownership field, 168,297 rows read CCC, 10,891 Private, 2,746 NZTA and 4 Joint. By the age class field, 70,636 rows read Mature, 49,007 Semi-Mature, 48,846 Juvenile, 9,739 Unknown and 4,554 Veteran. The protection field is filled on 4,538 rows: 2,711 read Subdivision, 702 District Plan, 669 Resource Consent and 456 District Plan Significant. The location certainty field reads Approximate XY on 165,936 rows and Survey Accurate on 9,177.

The most frequent common names were Kowhai with 8,536 rows, Silver Birch with 6,414, Ribbonwood with 6,201, Manna Ash with 5,737, Cabbage tree with 5,602, Pin Oak with 5,460 and Yoshino Cherry with 5,431, out of 898 distinct non-empty common names. The target frequency field, with values from Constant Use to Perpetual Use, reads Frequent Use on 50,385 rows. These are row counts in the layer, not a statement about how many trees stand in the city.

Licence

The map service and feature service both give their copyright text as Christchurch City Council. Neither carries a licence field. No licence statement for this layer was found on the services on October 10, 2026, and this page does not say which licence applies.

Sources