City tree data in New York City: Forestry Tree Points and the 2015 census
What NYC Open Data publishes about city trees: the Forestry Tree Points dataset with 1,123,163 records on October 8, 2026, updated every 2 weeks, and the 2015 Street Tree Census that counted 666,134 street trees.
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 public datasets as their portal publishes them. It reports the portal's own descriptions, column lists, record counts and update fields 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 permit rules for the same trees are on the New York City tree rules page.
Forestry Tree Points
NYC Open Data lists Forestry Tree Points under the Environment category, with the Department of Parks and Recreation as agency and the Forestry Management System (ForMS) as the data collection. Its description calls it a record of forestry tree points for NYC Parks, and says Tree Points and Planting Spaces form the basis of the ForMS 2.0 data inventory. Every Tree Point has a Planting Space, and a Planting Space can have no more than one active Tree Point at a time. A location where one tree was removed and another planted appears as one Planting Space with one retired Tree Point and one active one, so the file holds retired points as well as active trees. The description links a user guide and a data dictionary and says the dataset can be joined to the Forestry Planting Spaces dataset.
The metadata gives the update frequency as every 2 weeks, by automation, and the date made public as March 8, 2017. The portal's data-updated stamp read October 7, 2026, and the portal's record query returned a count of 1,123,163 and a latest updated-date value of October 6, 2026. The columns include DBH, structure, condition, stump diameter, species (genus and species), created, updated and planted dates, risk rating and its date, location, and borough, community district, council district and police precinct boundaries. A grouping query on the condition column returned counts of Excellent 108,901, Good 468,047, Fair 325,367, Poor 49,984, Critical 7,082, Dead 130,048 and Unknown 33,723, so the record count is not a count of living trees.
The 2015 Street Tree Census
The dataset 2015 Street Tree Census, Tree Data comes from the TreesCount census, conducted by volunteers and Parks staff. Its description calls it the third decadal street tree census and says data collection ran from May 2015 to October 2016. It states that the results show 666,134 trees planted along NYC's streets, and that the data is a snapshot in time of trees under Parks jurisdiction. The portal's record query returned 683,788 rows, which includes records of other status. The metadata marks the update frequency as historical data, with no automation and a date made public of June 3, 2016. Columns include tree ID, block ID, diameter, stump diameter, curb location, status, health, Latin and common species names, steward, guards, sidewalk condition, problems recorded and address fields. The description points to the ForMS datasets for the current tree population.
Licence
Neither dataset's metadata record carries a licence field. The attribution field on both names the Department of Parks and Recreation.