City tree data in Los Angeles: the 1990s street tree inventory
What Los Angeles' open data portal publishes as its street tree inventory: a dataset titled 1990s with 810,931 rows on October 8, 2026, inventory dates from 1981 to 1999, a one-line description and the CC0 public domain dedication it 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. The City's permit and ordinance pages for street trees are on the Los Angeles tree rules page.
What the dataset is
The dataset is titled Street Tree Inventory - 1990s and is listed under the Bureau of Street Services as data owner, in the category City Infrastructure and Service Requests. Its whole description is one line, which says the data was converted from an old desktop database. The portal shows the rows last updated on March 24, 2016 and the refresh rate as Other - See Description, and the description gives no refresh information. The dataset does not describe itself as current, and this page does not read it as the city's present tree count.
Rows and fields
The portal's record query returned a count of 810,931 on October 8, 2026. The inventory date field runs from March 29, 1981 to February 27, 1999 as the portal's own query returned them. The update date field returned only the text NULL as its latest value. The dataset has 79 columns, among them a tree ID, location area and unit, species code, common and botanical names, street and the two streets that bound the block, diameter, inventory date, trunk count, height, condition, pest, well status and cover, guard, utility line fields, council district, growing space material and size, curb, sidewalk, root pruning dates and coordinates, plus matched columns for neighborhood councils, specific plans, precincts, council districts, census tracts and ZIP codes.
The common name VACANT - OK TO PLANT appears on 116,720 rows, so not every row is a tree. After that came crape myrtle with 45,000 rows, Mexican fan palm with 42,013, American sweetgum with 39,095 and southern magnolia with 33,955. The condition field mixes spellings: its largest values were the text NULL on 408,309 rows, Good on 152,652, HEALTHY on 74,127, Fair on 64,786, FAIR on 50,810 and GOOD on 31,741. These are row counts in the portal, not a statement about how many trees stand in the city.
Licence
The licence field reads Creative Commons 1.0 Universal (Public Domain Dedication) and links the CC0 legal code. The Creative Commons deed says the person who associated a work with it has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all rights worldwide under copyright law, to the extent allowed by law, and that the work can be copied, modified and distributed even for commercial purposes.
Sources
- City of Los Angeles, Street Tree Inventory - 1990s (dataset record and records count), read October 8, 2026
- City of Los Angeles, Street Tree Inventory - 1990s (grouped counts by common name), read October 8, 2026
- City of Los Angeles, Street Tree Inventory - 1990s (inventory date range), read October 8, 2026
- Creative Commons, CC0 1.0 Universal deed, read October 8, 2026