Pittsburgh Urban Forest

The Forestry Division has been implementing a master plan for the care of City trees since late 2012. The plan itself was crafted by the Davey Resource Group (DRG) from Kent, Ohio. The project is to establish a road map for the effective management of the urban forest in Pittsburgh.

A city like Pittsburgh with over 900 miles of streets 'should' have 60,000 street trees, and 'could' have up to 90,000 street trees. Trees are necessary to improve air quality, reduce stormwater(see stormwater tab at the top) runoff, reduce energy costs, and create pride in each neighborhood. However, Pittsburgh's inventory showed that we only had 31,524 street trees as of August 2005. At the same time, we became aware that 10% of this number of trees required removal over the next four years.

In 2015 a new street inventory was conducted.

A state-funded program called TreeVitalize has been planting since 2005. This partnership with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, Tree Pittsburgh and Allegheny County has resulted in over 20,000 trees to date being planted in various neighborhoods, and county parks.

The public is invited to enter the City's inventory website, TreeKeeper Database (Under Maintenance until further notice), to check on the street trees in your neighborhood. The inventory is a snapshot of the urban forest the day you look at it, but remember that since trees are living organisms there are constant changes to the inventory based upon new pruning, removal, and planting data.