Is there a map of tree types across the UK, and the world, that you can simply explore? This is my attempt: every mapped wood in Great Britain by type, the species and planting years of England's public forests, and where 88 tree genera turn up in the world's plant records.
Trees are everywhere in Britain and yet surprisingly hard to see as a whole. The Forestry Commission maps every wood of half a hectare or more from aerial photographs, the National Forest Inventory, and publishes it as open data. I took all 641,642 of its 2024 map polygons, the species and planting year of every one of the 73,109 compartments in England's public forests, and the records of 88 tree genera from GBIF, the world's largest open archive of where living things have been seen. Then I put them on one map.
Start with Great Britain: zoom in until you can see single woods, switch to the summary of cover and mix, or pick a tree and see where it is recorded. Then switch to the world. Use "Map layers" to change the base map, add hills, place names and borders, and turn the colours up or down so you can always see where you are.
Type a town, village, wood or postcode in Great Britain, or any city of 15,000 people or more anywhere in the world, or use your location. You get the woodland around you and the trees most often recorded there; the map follows.
Woodland covers 13.7% of Great Britain's land, 3,153 thousand hectares of it. The three countries are very different. Scotland has 48% of Britain's woodland on a third of its land, and 71% of its broadleaf and conifer woodland is conifer. England's woods are mostly broadleaved: only 25% is conifer. Wales sits between, at 41%.
About a fifth of all woodland (19%) was mapped as felled or being prepared for replanting, most of it in Scotland, where it is 29% of the woodland. That is the plantation cycle at work: conifer crops are clear-felled and replanted, and newly planted ground can look bare from the air for some years, so some of this land has probably been replanted already.
Of the 87 counties and council areas, Moray is the most wooded, at 30.8%, closely followed by South Ayrshire, Argyll and Bute, and Dumfries and Galloway, all around 30% and all mostly conifer. England's most wooded county is Surrey (25.2%), and its woods are 20% conifer. In Wales it is West Glamorgan (27.2%). The barest are the islands: Shetland has 0.04% woodland, Orkney 0.21% and the Western Isles 1.1%. In England, Cambridgeshire (3.6%) and the East Riding of Yorkshire are the least wooded.
The great plantations stand out on the map at once. The most wooded 10 km square in Britain is NY68 in Kielder Forest, Northumberland: 81% woodland, 98% of it conifer. Within 10 km of the middle of Kielder Forest, 63% of the land is woodland and 96% of that is conifer; around Glentrool in Galloway the figures are 61% and 91%; around Thetford, in the Breckland pine forest, 42% and 70%. Compare the New Forest around Lyndhurst (42% woodland, 28% conifer) and the Chilterns around High Wycombe (22%, 17%).
At the other end, 100 of the 2,303 10 km squares with at least 50 km² of land have less than 1% woodland. The Western Isles hold 22 of them, Shetland 11 and Orkney 8; Highland has 16; and the open farmland of Lincolnshire (16), Cambridgeshire (10) and Norfolk (4) most of the rest. 60 squares are more than half woodland.
The National Forest Inventory says what kind of wood is where, but not which trees. For that I turned to GBIF, which gathers records of where species were seen or collected, from herbarium sheets to phone apps and national surveys. In Great Britain there are 77,858,769 records of vascular plants in the grid I used (0.09 degree cells, about 10 by 6 km). Pick "Recorded trees" on the map and choose a tree.
The patterns are recognisable. The share of records that are pines is highest in Strathspey and the northern Cairngorms, in the cell about 12 km south east of Nethy Bridge (7.5% of all its plant records). This is the country of Abernethy and Rothiemurchus, the largest remnants of the native Caledonian pinewood. Juniper, a shrub of those pinewoods, peaks in the next cell to the south west (17.4%), and birch in the cell south of that, towards Braemar (11.5%). Beech peaks at Wootton Rivers beside Savernake Forest in Wiltshire (3.3%), ash on the edge of Swindon, and oak in the cell around Long Ditton in Surrey. Within 10 km of Abernethy Forest, 44% of the land is woodland, 84% of it conifer.
Records are not trees, and the map shows it. Willows are the most recorded tree genus in most British cells (2,863 of 4,089 cells with 500 or more records), because there are many willow species and botanists record them carefully, not because willow is our commonest tree. And where one big survey has been shared, it can swamp a cell: around Bala in Gwynedd, spruce makes up 28% of all plant records. That is why I map shares of plant records, not counts, and fade cells with few records; even so, read the "Recorded trees" layer as a map of what botanists have noted, not a census.
Forestry England manages the public forests of England, and it publishes every compartment with its main species and the year the current trees were planted. Its 73,109 compartments cover 254,585 hectares, of which 185,816 carry a recorded species. 67% of that is conifer: Sitka spruce alone is 25.8%, Corsican pine 12.7% and Scots pine 9.9%. Oak is the biggest broadleaf, at 9.0%, then beech at 7.5%. Tick "Public forest species" on the map and zoom in to see each compartment as a dot.
This is not the history of planting, because when a crop is felled and replanted, its compartment takes the new date. So the trees standing today were mostly planted from the 1950s on, and conifer planting peaks in the 1990s, the restocking of the great post-war plantations. What the chart does show is the change in what goes in: broadleaves were 47% of the area planted in the 1950s that still stands, 22% in the 1960s and 18% in the 1990s, then 26% in the 2000s and 24% in the 2010s. Sitka spruce is 42% of the area standing from plantings in 1980 to 1999 and 41% of plantings since 2000.
Switch the map to "The world". GBIF holds 526,962,197 records of vascular plants, and I fetched the records of 88 tree genera, from oaks and pines to baobabs, mahoganies and mangroves. The first map asks which of those genera is most recorded in each 0.35 degree cell with at least 200 plant records. It is dominated by big, much-recorded genera: figs over 14% of the qualifying land, mostly in the tropics; willows over 13%, mostly in northern Europe; oaks over 10%.
So the default map asks a fairer question: which genus is most typical of each cell, recorded far more often there than across the world as a whole? Then the continents come alive. In Oceania it is acacias, bloodwoods and eucalypts; in Africa figs, thorn acacias and bushwillows; in South America the ice-cream bean trees (Inga) of the rainforest and its edges; in Europe willows, spruces and birches; in North America oaks, willows, pines and junipers.
Pick a genus to see its own map. Pines are the most recorded of these genera in 21% of Spain's qualifying land and around 12% of Poland's and the United States'. Oaks lead in 62% of Spain and 41% of Mexico, which has more kinds of oak than any other country. Eucalypts lead in 38% of Australia, sharing it with the acacias (54%).
Recording effort shapes every world map here. Europe and North America hold 86% of all the plant records on land but only 32% of the land. The tropics are 34% of the land and hold 6.6% of the records, though they are home to most of the world's tree species. Europe has 16,081 records per 1,000 km²; Africa has 289.
So I keep a cell only when it has 200 or more plant records, and fade it when it has fewer than ten times that. That leaves 32% of the world's land, and 20% of Africa. Switch to "Recording effort" to see the gaps. In the heart of the Congo basin only 10% of cells pass, with a median of 6 records; in the inner Amazon 19%; in central Siberia 1.2%. These are some of the most forested places on Earth, and the emptiest on this map.
Woodland. The National Forest Inventory (NFI) GB 2024 woodland map, layer NFI_GB_IFT_Data_20250826, has 641,642 polygons (611,229 woodland, the rest open ground inside woods). I had each polygon's centroid, interpreted forest type, country and area, from two downloads that together give the full count with no duplicates. I group the fourteen woodland types into seven: broadleaved; mixed, mainly broadleaved; mixed, mainly conifer; conifer; young trees; felled and restocking (felled, ground prepared, windblow, failed); and other (low density, shrub, coppice, assumed woodland). "Conifer share" is conifer and mixed mainly conifer over those plus broadleaved and mixed mainly broadleaved. For the map I draw each polygon as a disc of its own area at its centroid on a 100 m grid; county and country totals use the exact polygon areas, assigned to counties by centroid. Land areas come from ONS boundaries of ceremonial counties (England), preserved counties (Wales) and council areas (Scotland).
Public forests. Forestry England's 73,109 subcompartments, with main species, land use and planting year, as centroids. I class each species as conifer or broadleaf (yew and juniper as conifers).
Records. GBIF occurrence density maps for 88 tree genera and for all vascular plants, conifers and dicots, at about 0.088 degree resolution, retrieved on 28 October 2026. Two genera (Cedrus and Washingtonia) were matched by GBIF only to all vascular plants, so I dropped them. Each genus is mapped as its share of all vascular plant records in the cell; the world map adds cells into 0.35 degree squares. "Most typical" is the genus whose share in the cell is highest relative to its share of all the world's records (at least 20 records of it). Species level grids for Britain were planned but were not in the download, so the British "Recorded trees" layer shows genera.
Limits. The NFI maps woodland of 0.5 ha and over from aerial imagery, so hedgerows, small copses and lone trees are missing, and types are interpreted from the air. It covers Great Britain, not Northern Ireland. The disc drawing places area correctly to within a polygon's size but not its shape. Forestry England covers only the public estate in England, and planting years are of the current crop. GBIF counts records, not trees: it follows where people look and record, it mixes planted, garden and wild trees, and a single large survey can dominate a cell.