Look, we get it. You googled “free trees near me” and got a 47-tab rabbit hole of PDFs, broken links, and forms that want your mother's maiden name. Cool. Super accessible. Really making conservation easy out here.
Urban forestry has a marketing problem. It's not that people don't care about trees. It's that finding your city's free tree program requires a PhD in Local Government Website Archaeology and the patience of a saint who also happens to know what a “conservation district” is.
Curb Canopy fixes that
One zip code. Tree equity scores, canopy coverage, carbon sequestration, heat islands, environmental justice indicators, all for 6,500+ cities. And for the cities where we've done the digging: free saplings, planting programs, grants, native species guides. All the stuff your municipality technically provides but hid behind seven clicks and a PDF from 2011.
We're not here to lecture you about carbon sequestration (though trees do slap at that). We're here because your block deserves shade. Your kids deserve somewhere to climb. Your dog deserves a dignified place to pee. And someone should probably tell you that your neighborhood is 6°F hotter than it needs to be.
We're not trying to save the rainforest. The rainforest doesn't need your help finding a form. Your neighborhood does.
The world's just a bunch of blocks. Let's start with yours.
What Curb Canopy actually does
Tree Equity Data
Every city gets a score. Canopy coverage, heat islands, carbon sequestration, stormwater interception, 1930s redlining overlap, environmental justice indicators. All across 197,000+ neighborhoods. The numbers that tell you where trees are needed most.
Get Rooted
Free municipal tree planting programs, verified applications, volunteer events, and seasonal planting calendars. For homeowners and renters alike. This is the part we’re building city by city, and where your local knowledge matters most.
Know Your Roots
Invasive species alerts. Native species guides. Urban forestry benefits localized to your area, like heat reduction, property values, and stormwater stats.
Branching Out
Local artists, musicians, books, and landmarks connected to nature and conservation in your city. Because trees aren’t just infrastructure. They’re culture.
Support
Merch with a transparent split-donation model. $1 to a local conservation org, $1 to a national one. Every dollar tracked, every receipt public.
Programs are the mission, data is how we get there
We started with three cities and a dream of making tree programs findable. Then we pulled in tree equity data from American Forests. 197,000 Census block groups across 6,500+ cities. Turns out the data itself was wildly useful. Now every city in America has canopy stats, equity scores, carbon numbers, and heat island data on Curb Canopy, even before we've tracked down the local programs.
The full-profile cities get programs, native species guides, invasive alerts, local resources, and verified sources. The other 6,500? They get the data while we figure out the rest. Your searches tell us which cities to build out next.
The goal is still the same: make it stupid easy to find a free tree. The data just tells us where to dig first.
Radical transparency, by design
Every stat on this site has a source. Every source has a verification date. The ones we're not sure about? We say so, with an asterisk. No dressing up uncertainty as fact.
The donation tracker starts at $0.00 before we've sold a single thing. We show it anyway, so you can watch it climb and hold us to it.
No ads. No data selling. Revenue from being genuinely useful to people who care about their city.
Full city profiles with programs being added as communities contribute.