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City tree data in Melbourne, Australia: Trees with species and dimensions (Urban Forest)

What the City of Melbourne open data portal publishes about the urban forest: the 82,064 records the portal counts on October 9, 2026, the park and street split, the useful life field last updated in 2009 and the Creative Commons Attribution licence.

Checked against the sources at the bottom of this page on October 9, 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, column list, record counts and licence field as read on October 9, 2026. It does not interpret the numbers. The family overview is on the guide to city open tree data. For the diversity targets cities set for street trees see the guide to street tree diversity.

What the dataset is

The dataset is titled Trees, with species and dimensions (Urban Forest) and is published by the City of Melbourne Open Data Team. Its description says the City maintains more than 80,000 trees and that the dataset details the location, species and lifespan of the urban forest by precinct. It points to an interactive tree map and says the City's Urban Forest Strategy and precinct consultation summaries can be downloaded from the attachments. The record names its theme as Environment and says each row is a tree. The quality section says all data held by the City has been included and rates reliability as reliable and timely. It lists one known issue: date and year planted fields may have missing date values.

Records, update and columns

The portal's record query returned a count of 82,064 on October 9, 2026. The record gives two update fields that do not match: the source data update frequency reads Monthly and the quality section's update frequency reads Daily. The portal's data-processed timestamp was September 22, 2025.

The columns are the City's asset identifier, common name, scientific name, genus, family, diameter at breast height, year planted, date planted, an age description, useful life expectancy, a useful life expectancy value, the precinct, a located-in field, upload date, and coordinates. The planted fields carry a caution: the record says they are generally accurate for trees planted from 2003 onwards, and that before 2003 they indicate the date the trees were added to the inventory. The age description is based on date planted or date of data entry, so it is sometimes inaccurate, and a null value means not yet assessed. The useful life expectancy column is described as last updated in 2009.

The located-in column splits the rows into 48,262 in a park and 33,802 on a street. By row count the most common genera were eucalyptus (Eucalyptus) with 17,687, wattle (Acacia) with 7,667, elm (Ulmus) with 6,102, plane (Platanus) with 5,646, corymbia (Corymbia) with 4,694 and Allocasuarina with 4,010. The most common common names were river red gum with 8,338, London plane with 5,070, drooping sheoak with 3,452, English elm with 3,291 and yellow box with 3,043. The precincts with the most rows were Parkville with 28,567, Melbourne with 9,063, Kensington with 7,555, West Melbourne with 6,756 and Docklands with 5,816. In the useful life column 22,604 rows read more than 41 years, 21,115 read 21 to 30 years, 15,989 read 31 to 40 years, 4,283 read 11 to 20 years, 663 read under 10 years and 17,410 are empty.

Licence

The record's licence field reads CC BY and links the legal code of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. This page does not restate the licence: the linked text is the one that applies.

Sources