Historic Urban Tree Canopy Cover of Great Britain

Urban trees create healthy and pleasant places to live and help towns and cities cope with the effects of climate change.

This paper reports changes in tree canopy cover since the 1940s for ten urban areas across Great Britain. 

The study examined aerial photography to reveal that in those ten areas there is a predominant trend of increasing tree cover from the 1940s to 2018, but that over the past two decades there is more variation in whether tree canopy cover is increasing or decreasing in those areas.

These analyses enable us to understand how we can better protect, manage and plan existing and future urban forests, for example by setting meaningful and realistic urban tree canopy cover targets.