GuideLiving here
Nature and wildlife
How green an area is, how many street trees it has, how close a nature reserve is, and which animals people have recorded nearby.
Use it
Example
An area with 46% green land, 9 street trees per hectare and a nature reserve 600 m away ranks well on Nature. If 11 of every 100 records within 1 km are hedgehogs, the hedgehog map shades it Often.
How we calculate it
- Green land: Sentinel-2 satellite images from June and July 2025. Each 10 m square counts as green when its NDVI is 0.4 or more.
- Street trees: the GLA list of council, TfL and Royal Parks trees (Nov 2025), per hectare of the area.
- Nature sites: Natural England Local Nature Reserves and SSSIs. The Nature rank combines all three as London ranks.
- Wildlife seen: bird, mammal and amphibian records on GBIF within 1 km (2021–2025, CC0 or CC BY only). Each species is shown as its share of those records.
The fine print
- Records follow where people look. "No record" never means absent, and areas with under 200 records are grey.
- Badgers, breeding raptors and other sensitive species are never mapped; no single sighting is ever shown.
- Satellite greenness counts gardens and green roofs as well as parks; it says nothing about access.
- Borough Sites of Importance for Nature Conservation are not openly licensed and are not included.
Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2025). Greater London Authority, London Datastore: Local Authority Maintained Trees, and © Natural England, both under the Open Government Licence v3.0. GBIF.org occurrence records, CC0 and CC BY 4.0.