Melbourne residents email 70,000 trees to map and protect urban forests

Seventy thousand trees in Melbourne now have email addresses. Not as a joke—as infrastructure.

The city's Urban Forest and Ecology team built an interactive digital map called the Urban Forest Visual that lets residents click on any tree to see its species, age, and health status. Each tree has its own email address. Report a sick elm. Compliment an oak. The system turns casual observation into data that helps the city actually manage its green space.

Trees can be identified via a digital map, and residents can email them directly. Photo courtesy of Urban Forest Strategy

Since the project launched, over 10,000 emails have arrived in tree inboxes. Some are practical—flagging branches that need pruning or signs of disease. Others are purely affectionate. One person wrote to a Rose Gum they cycled past daily: "Over the past year I have cycled by you each day and want you to know how much joy you give me. No matter the weather or what is happening around you, you are strong, elegant and beautiful."

There's something quietly clever happening here. Melbourne's Urban Forest Strategy aims to nearly double the city's canopy cover from 22% to 40% by 2040—a massive climate adaptation goal. But you can't manage what you don't see. You can't prioritize what you don't know about. By making trees visible and giving residents a direct channel to report what they notice, the city transforms thousands of daily commuters into a distributed monitoring network.

The emails also do something less measurable but harder to ignore: they make trees feel present. Noticed. Real enough to write to. In a city, that shift in how people think about the green things around them can be the difference between a tree that gets protected and one that gets cut down when budgets tighten.

Melbourne's next step is planting thousands more trees—which means thousands more email addresses, and thousands more chances for someone to notice.