Urban Forest Plan

The City has developed an Urban Forest Plan aimed at enhancing tree canopy coverage on both City-owned and privately-owned land in the coming decades. While the plan establishes a clear path for the City to follow, fostering a greener and more verdant living environment is a collective responsibility. The Urban Forest Plan guides and encourages the community to also create greener neighbourhoods for the future.

The City has undertaken extensive mapping to understand changes to ‘significant canopy’ (defined as tree canopy cover that’s taller than three metres and has an area larger than 20m²). Analysing high-resolution airborne multispectral imagery, the City can calculate changes to significant canopy over time and space. 

Key facts

• Stirling has 12.1 percent tree canopy (2023)
• Nearly 2.6 million m² of significant canopy has been lost since 2012; that’s equivalent to approximately 74,300 medium sized trees
• The highest amount of tree canopy is found on City managed land
• Canopy on City land has increased over 10 years; however, it is offset by losses on residential land, causing overall canopy decline. This loss is primarily from development on private land
• 87% of suburbs now have less tree canopy within privately-owned-residential land, than they did in 2012.
• Solutions in the City’s Urban Forest Plan such as planting 10,000 new trees each year on City managed land helps us to slow down canopy loss, but we need the community’s help
• One of the best things you can do to help the canopy grow, is to keep the existing trees that you have on your property. The next best thing is to plant new trees

Street tree master plan

As part of the Urban Forest Plan, the City plants around 10,0000 trees on residential verges, reserves and streets.

The way we live is rapidly changing, as we maximise liveable space on ever shrinking blocks the humble backyard is fast disappearing, in its place, paving, plastic grass and parking. This vegetation loss has serious health, environmental and financial impacts.

The Street Tree Master Plan has been developed to help us map our future streetscapes and ensure diversity of tree species across the City.  Although diversity and consistency may seem like opposing ideas, they are both essential in creating a healthy and resilient urban forest.

Street themes

It is important to remember that street trees are part of the streetscape and not a part of the individual landscaping of each property.

To create consistent streetscapes, the City looks at how many trees could potentially be planted within a streetscape, and how many currently exist.  It also measures how many of a particular species exist which helps identify which streets may be able to adopt a new theme to meet diverse needs.

Where there is the ability to change to a new species, the selected species will be used to plant the gaps in the streetscape and to replace any trees that reach the end of their natural life.

In time, this will create a consistent avenue of trees.

Street classification and species selection

The available space and the characteristics (topology) of the street have a strong influence on what species will be assigned to that location.

Average widths of verges have been estimated and street types have been assigned to one of the following five classifications:

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