Trees Outside Woodland

The trees that stand apart from the woods. Away from Dartmoor's woods and plantations, the moor is dotted with trees on their own: a windblown hawthorn on a steep bank, a single beech at a gateway, a huddle of rowan in a valley and a willow by the boggy bits. This map gathers them all, the lone trees, the small groups and the little woodlands, so you can see how the moor is treed. Turning the layer on switches to a satellite view, because scattered trees make far more sense against an aerial photograph.

Open the full-screen tree map →

What are "trees outside woodland"?

Most tree maps only show woodland: solid blocks of forest and copse. But a great many of Dartmoor's trees grow outside those blocks, and they matter just as much for the landscape, for wildlife and for shelter. This map shows three kinds:

Lone trees

Single trees standing on their own, the ones walkers use as landmarks.

Groups of trees

Small clusters, too small to count as a wood but too many to be lone trees.

Small woodlands

Little woods below the size threshold of the national forest inventory.

Where the data comes from

The trees are from Forest Research's Trees Outside Woodland map, a national dataset produced automatically from aerial survey and published as open government data. We take the features that fall inside Dartmoor National Park and serve them a small area at a time, so the map stays quick even though there are around a hundred thousand of them. The aerial base map is Esri World Imagery; the standard base map is OpenStreetMap; the National Park outline is from the Dartmoor National Park Authority.

How accurate is it?

Treat it as a guide, not gospel. Because it is generated automatically from imagery, the map only picks up trees taller than about three metres, so younger and smaller trees are missing. It can also contain errors, occasionally marking a tree where there is none. I've already noticed three trees on the map, which I know do not exist (and in the same area, others which the survey has missed, that I have photographs off!).It is a wonderful broad picture of the moor's scattered trees, but not a survey of every individual one.

How to use the map

Zoom in to a valley or hillside and the trees appear one by one, sized and shaded by kind. Click any tree to see its type and its exact coordinates. Zoomed right out, the map asks you to zoom in rather than showing a misleading tangle. Flip back to the standard or terrain base map any time from Map layers.

The Lone Trees project

This open-data layer is the starting point for something more personal: a community Lone Trees project, where we add photographs of the individual trees people know and love across the moor, in every season and light. If you have a favourite lone tree, that is where it will live. See the full Our Dartmoor map →

Trees Outside Woodland data © Forest Research, Open Government Licence v3.0. Aerial imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics. Base map © OpenStreetMap contributors. Our Dartmoor is a community project built with the help of AI; the tree data is provided in good faith and is not a survey of every tree.