City tree data in Toronto: the street tree data file
What Toronto's open data portal publishes about its street trees: the fields in each record, the 688,335 rows in the current CSV file on October 8, 2026, the stated limits on location and age of the data, and the two licence texts the City shows.
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, file row count and licence wording 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 bylaw rules for the same trees are on the Toronto tree rules page.
What the dataset is
The dataset is titled Street Tree Data and is published by Toronto's Parks, Forestry and Recreation division on the City's open data portal. Its description says it mainly covers City-owned trees on road allowances across Toronto, and that the intent is an inventory for inspection and maintenance. It adds that where staff confirmed private ownership of a tree inside the road allowance, that tree may also be in the database. The portal lists the date published as December 1, 2011 and the dataset category as Map.
Records, update and fields
The package record gives the refresh rate as "As available" and shows a last refreshed time of June 4, 2026. The description says the database covers over 530,000 records and that each year Urban Forestry can only update the volume that was worked on, so some data may be several years old. The portal's current CSV file in the WGS84 projection held 688,335 data rows when it was downloaded on October 8, 2026, and the portal's data service returned the same total for the GeoJSON resource. Both numbers come from the portal and differ from each other.
Each record carries these fields: a structure ID, street number, street name, two cross streets, a suffix, a unit number, a tree position number, a site, a ward, a botanical name, a common name, a trunk diameter (DBH_TRUNK, an integer) and a point geometry. The file shows 26 different ward values. The portal's own file listed 3,307 rows with the trunk diameter field empty. The most frequent common names in the file were Norway maple with 69,468 rows, honey locust with 27,758, Colorado blue spruce with 24,086, red oak with 23,707 and littleleaf linden with 21,366. Those counts are rows in the file, not a statement about how many trees stand in the city.
Limits the description states
The description says the positions are not accurate because the tree data was geocoded to the parcel address, which can place a tree inside the private parcel, and that the file should not be used to verify ownership. It recommends overlaying the file on the City's street centreline file. A note says location information is being improved, so some trees still sit at the address point while others are mapped at their physical place on the street. Files are offered as CSV, shapefile, GeoJSON and GeoPackage, in more than one map projection.
Licence
The package record's licence field reads "License not specified". The City's separate Open Data Licence page names the Open Government Licence, Toronto, which it says is based on version 1.0 of the Open Government Licence, Ontario. That page says the licence allows copying, adapting and distributing the information in any medium for any lawful purpose, including commercial use, with the source acknowledged and a stated attribution line. This page reports both texts and does not say which applies to this file.