The Greater Boston Urban Forest Inventory (GBUFI) developed as a result of the growing awareness of the importance of urban forest management and the recognition that little was known about the extent and condition of Boston's urban forest. In 2006, the Urban Ecology Institute and Boston's Urban Forest Coalition completed the first-ever comprehensive inventory of Boston's urban forest. The inventory included both an analysis of Boston's overall tree cover using aerial imagery and a detailed survey of Boston's street trees. Urban tree canopy refers to the extent of land covered by trees, including street trees in sidewalks, trees in parks, trees on private property, and trees on commercial and institutional grounds. We used aerial photography and remote sensing imagery to classify land cover by type including tree canopy cover, pervious surfaces (such as dirt and grass), water, wetland, and impervious surface. The Forest Opportunity Spectrum (FOS), a modeling program developed by the USDA Forest Service, was then used to calculate the existing urban tree canopy and possible additional tree canopy of each of Boston’s sixteen neighborhoods. The overall current canopy cover of Boston is 29%. An inventory of Boston's street trees was implemented to determine the quantity of trees, the diversity and composition of species present, the condition of the trees (including health, size, etc.), and the locations of the trees and tree pits. A total of 34487 street trees and 3449 tree pits were identified throughout Boston. The information obtained from both the urban tree canopy analysis and street tree inventory serve to improve management of current street trees, to establish planting goals for increasing the extent of the canopy cover, and to identify priority planting zones throughout the City of Boston. The full report detailing the results of GBUFI, including individual neighborhood analyses, is here:

State of the Urban Forest Report