What Grows Where: Mapping the Woodland of Great Britain and the Recorded Trees of the World

There is no easy, open, interactive map of which trees grow where in Britain, let alone the world. I build one from three open sources and report what it shows. The National Forest Inventory (NFI) GB 2024 woodland map has 641,642 polygons; its 611,229 woodland polygons cover 3,153 thousand hectares, 13.7% of Great Britain's land: 19.1% of Scotland, 15.0% of Wales and 10.3% of England. Conifers make up 71.0% of Scotland's broadleaf and conifer woodland but only 25.1% of England's. Moray is the most wooded county or council area (30.8%) and Shetland the least (0.04%); the most wooded 10 km square is in Kielder Forest (81.1%). In England's public forests, Forestry England's 73,109 subcompartments show that 67.1% of the stocked area is conifer, Sitka spruce alone 25.8%, and that the broadleaf share of the standing crop falls from 47.0% for 1950s plantings to 18.0% for the 1990s before rising to 25.6% for the 2000s. Worldwide, GBIF occurrence density grids for 88 tree genera, expressed as shares of all vascular plant records, give recognisable regional signatures (acacias, bloodwoods and eucalypts in Oceania; figs, thorn acacias and bushwillows in Africa), but recording effort dominates: Europe and North America hold 86.3% of land plant records on 32.1% of the land, and the tropics 6.6% on 34.1%. The records map is a map of recording, not of forest. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/tree-map/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/tree-map. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/tree-map/.