About

What is Treezilla?

Treezilla is 'The Monster Map of Trees'! It's a citizen science project that is aiming to encourage members of the public, local authorities, business, local groups and other organisations to collaborate in mapping, measuring and monitoring trees across the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. The project was started in 2013 as a collaboration between the Open University, Forest Research and Treeconomics.

Treezilla was originally built on a software platform called OpenTreeMap and has subsequently been updated to OpenTreeMap2. In 2020 we are working with citizen science app developers Natural Apptitude to build a completely new app and website.

The project has a particular focus on urban trees, because those are closest to most of us, but are also not well documented. There may be as many as 1.5 billion urban trees in the UK, but less than ten percent are recorded in databases. A much smaller percentage are available in open and online information for the public to find out about. Treezilla (https://www.treezilla.org/treezilla/map/ ) is the UK's biggest open tree map with more than 1 million tree records.

Treezilla is free for anyone to join and contribute data. You can view information about any tree on the map by clicking on it.

Why urban trees?

In Treezilla you can map trees anywhere in the UK and Republic of Ireland. But we're particularly interested in trees in urban areas. That's because these trees are relatively poorly known, they provide important benefits to the majority of the population (most of us live in urban areas) and because there is a great and fascinating variety of urban trees.

One of the aims of Treezilla is to introduce people to the idea of 'ecosystem services'. These are the benefits that nature provides to people. The ecosystem services page on this site explains more about what they are and how they're calculated in Treezilla.

Who uses Treezilla?

Treezilla is available for anyone to use. It's free to register and start adding trees. Treezilla is used by individual tree surveyors (from novices to experts), by Tree Wardens and their groups and by several hundred Open University students each year for their coursework.

Who funds Treezilla?

Treezilla was set up with a grant from The Wolfson Foundation and with support from The Open University and Forest Research. Subsequent development has been led by the Open University and Forest research with funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (project VITAL) and the Geospatial Commission (project COMMUNITREE). The Open University continues to support the maintenance and development of Treezilla through its Citizen Science team.

Terms of use for Treezilla

Terms of use for the Treezilla site and app can be found here.