Open spaces are not the only contributors to wildlife habitat and green infrastructure. Purpose built features, from nest boxes to rain gardens, enhance the urban greening of London. Features built for other purposes may also become valuable for wildlife or green infrastructure over time. Some river jetties, for example, house large bird roosts.

We hold a number of London-wide datasets that tell us about urban greening in the capital. We are developing these data holdings as a single integrated urban greening dataset.

We also continue to build a central dataset of street and park tree data.

Urban Greening Features

We hold a dataset of green and brown roof installations including verified data belonging to Livingroofs.org.  The GLA are helping us capture further green roof data from the London Business Improvement Districts and boroughs.

Data on river jetties used as significant water bird breeding roosts are supplied to us by the Inner Thames High Tide Bird Group.

London Wildlife Trust, Centre for Wildlife Gardening living roof (c) London Wildlife Trust

London Wildlife Trust, Centre for Wildlife Gardening living roof (c) London Wildlife Trust

Derelict barges, Rainham Marshes (c) Roger Manser

Tree data

We are building a shared dataset of street and park tree data including information from the London boroughs and major land holders such as The Royal Parks, on tree location, height, girth, canopy and age, and other attributes.

Originally, this was created to identify areas of London that would most benefit from creation or restoration of woodland. The street tree model was subsequently adapted to identify areas that would most benefit from additional street trees.

A bespoke data exchange agreement allows two-way exchange of tree data between GiGL and its service level agreement holders. However, at the request of the Tree Officers Association, GiGL does not provide the data to the National Biodiversity Network or to commercial customers.

Read more about the Capital Woodlands Data Model.

Branching Out; the future of London’s street trees report  

Download of tree data exchange agreement