US Forestry Data

Landfire – US Forest Service/USGS/USDA/The Nature Conservancy – from the web site – With LANDFIRE, you can view and download geospatial layers and data products that depict the nation’s major ecosystems, wildlife habitat, vegetation or canopy characteristics, landscape features, and wildland fire behavior, effects, and regimes.

2001 Tree Canopy data sets for the US

Multi-Resolution Land Cover Data, created by a consortium of US government agencies. This site has the first nation-wide canopy cover data set for the US. No information on species, but it’s possible to use it in conjunction with the land cover data from the same site to estimate evergreen versus deciduous. The MRLC is a consortium of US federal agencies (EPA, USGS, US Forest Service, etc.). See Production Status link for a map of what stage each region is in.  Read the metadata to understand the attribute information. The data is a raster data set with 30 meter pixels.

Climate Change Atlas for 80 Tree Species in the Eastern United States – US Forest Service

Maps out changes in bird and tree species due to climate change.

Forest Inventory and Analysis – US Forest Service

Home to the US Forest Census, links to data, tools, publications, etc. Note that the exact locations of the forest inventory cannot be provided to protect the privacy of private landowners from whom the data was collected. Nonetheless, the Forest Service works with researchers to facilitate research without compromising privacy rights.

US State and Local Tree Inventories

If you’re interested in local or state specific forest information, be sure to check out state forest agencies. Washington and Oregon both have fairly extensive GIS data sites.

Philadelphia Tree Map

Another effort for community tree mapping. Data can be downloaded in .csv or .kml file

San Francisco Urban Forest Map

This is a non-profit that allows users to map trees in San Francisco – data can be exported in a shape file or .csv or .kml file.

Global forestry data

Global Forest Watch

A variety of forest-related data sets from various regions around the globe. Global Forest Watch is an initiative of the World Resources Institute, which has a number of other environmental-related data sets online (go to Publications link, then Data Sets).