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Friends of the Earth recently sponsored a survey of tree canopy across England undertaken by TerraSulis using LIDAR data from the Environment Agency. This analysis is at the level of ONS census level LSOA, providing more detailed analysis than our own ward surveys. The data has been mapped here in a kml file for viewing with Google Earth.

The colour of an area is graded from red - lowest level of tree canopy- to green -highest. The colour of the dot is determined by the level of social deprivation which goes from red - high deprivation - to greeen - low.

The correlation between tree canopy and deprivation is 0.172 (but very scattered) so as with English cities, the more deprived areas have less tree canopy.

BCC has made fund available for enhancing tree planting and developing a Tree Strategy for Bristol. Bristol Tree Forum are working with Bristol City Council, Woodland Trust, Forest of Avon Trust and other organisations in this initiative.

A list of English councils has been added to help gather best practice from other councils in England.

After another successful planting year, we are working on mapping the areas planted this year. You can find them here.

Thanks to the excellent data captured and provided by the One Tree Per Child team this year, we have been able to map all the planting sites in schools and openspaces of woodland, hedges and the new Tiny Forest. You can find them all here. We hope to be able to map previous years so we have a full record of this planting program which has now planted 60,000 trees since it started in 2014.

iNaturalist is a popular app for identifying and recording wildlife observations. We have added links to select observations by species - eg Field Maple (look for the link under search) and of the Plants on a site eg. St Andrews Park.

Google Earth now provides historical imagery in Bristol covering a period of 20 years. This allows us to visualise changes in tree canopy over this period. As you might expect there have been both losses and gains but mainly the former. There is a Blog Post on how this imagery was captured

We have been developing our tool for estimating the tree canopy for areas of Bristol including wards and the whole of Bristol. This tool uses our own version of the i-Tree Canopy method based on random samples of points in an area. The overall finding from our re-surveying of the whole of the Bristol City area based on 2020 Google Earth imagery is that the percentage of Tree Canopy area in Bristol is about the same as it was in 2018, that is about 18.5%.

Bristol City Council does not plant street trees unless these are funded. There are { count(tp:get-tree-by-collection("Tree planting locations"))} tree sites available to sponsor privately or by a local groups. Here is a List and map of available sites