Why We Started Mapping Every Tree We Plant

For our first couple of years, we counted trees planted the way most young organisations do: a running total announced after each planting day, based on how many seedlings left the nursery. It was a reasonable headline number, but it told us almost nothing about what happened afterward.

We now record each tree's approximate location, species, planting date and the team that planted it, in a simple spreadsheet our Secretary maintains alongside the minutes of our meetings. It is not sophisticated mapping software, just consistent, structured record-keeping applied to something we used to track loosely.

The immediate benefit was survival tracking. Instead of a vague sense that some trees do better than others, we can now say with actual evidence which species, sites and planting windows produce the strongest first-year survival, and adjust our approach accordingly.

It has also made our reporting to partners and donors considerably more credible. A total tree count is easy to state and hard to verify; a location-and-species record that can be spot-checked on the ground is a very different kind of claim.

The next step, once volunteer time allows, is turning this spreadsheet into something residents can browse themselves, so that anyone in Donholm can see roughly when and where a particular street tree went in, and who planted it.