City tree data in Seattle: the SDOT street trees layer
What Seattle's open GIS data publishes about street trees: the 215,696 in-service rows the SDOT layer counts on October 8, 2026, the daily refresh the item states, the ownership and heritage flags and the disclaimer that stands in for a licence.
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 text 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 rules for the same trees are on the Seattle tree rules page.
What the dataset is
The item is titled SDOT Trees (Active) and is published by the Seattle Department of Transportation through the Seattle City GIS item account, with the access line City of Seattle, Seattle Department of Transportation. Its snippet reads that it displays trees maintained by the Seattle Department of Transportation. The description calls it a listing of both publicly and privately maintained trees in the public right of way, with information on condition, location, size, species and maintenance responsibility, collected to predict maintenance needs and to show how diverse the street tree population is. It says the layer applies a query of in-service status for general use, that the refresh cycle is daily, and that it is a subset view of a fuller layer.
Rows and fields
The layer returned a count of 215,696 rows on October 8, 2026, and every row has the current status INSVC. The layer record shows a last edit date of October 8, 2026. It has 54 fields, including component key, unit ID and description, condition and condition assessment date, current status and its date, ownership, last verify date, planted date, botanical, scientific and common names, genus, heritage and exceptional flags, wires, clearance problem, growing space, site type, diameter, tree height, maintenance management unit and coordinates.
By the ownership field, 170,043 rows read PRIV, 40,734 read SDOT, 2,442 PARK, 810 CONTRCTR, 705 SEAC and 400 SPU. The heritage flag read Y on 289 rows and the exceptional flag read Y on 33. By the condition field, 3,006 rows read FAIR, 222 read GOOD and 212,468 were empty. The genus counts led with Acer at 45,966 rows, then Prunus at 32,814, Malus at 10,451, Cornus at 8,754 and Quercus at 8,431. By common name the most frequent was Japanese maple with 8,534 rows. These are row counts in the portal, not a statement about how many trees stand in the city.
Licence
The item has no named licence. Its licence text is a disclaimer: the City of Seattle makes no representation or warranty as to the accuracy of the data, including labels, dimensions, contours, property boundaries or placement of any map feature. This page reports that text and does not say what use it allows.