A directory, kept by hand, open to all.
TreeRM lists the organizations that plant trees, what each one does, what it reports, and when you can show up to help.
Why this exists
TreeFolks' adoption events used to run on paper. They moved to a website, and after a couple of seasons wanted a redesign and asked me to join the working group for the RFP. The city of Austin was being difficult about funding it. So one of my team members and I volunteered to fix the existing platform. It saved them a lot of money and makes adoption day easier.
That work raised a plain question with no plain answer: who else is doing this, and how well? There are thousands of groups planting trees. Their numbers live in PDFs, on impact pages, in press releases. Nobody keeps them in one place in a form you can compare.
TreeRM is that place. The name is a pun on CRM. The idea is to track the relationships that make trees happen: the organizations first, and in time the volunteers, donors, growers and seed collectors around them.
How we count
Every figure on this site has a year, a source link, and a confidence label. We record what an organization says about itself and we say that we did.
- Self-reported: the organization's own published number, from an annual report, impact page or press release.
- Independently verified: a third party checked it, such as an auditor, a registry or a peer-reviewed study.
- Estimated: we derived it, for example by adding up per-country figures, and the note says how.
- Cumulative figures are marked "to date". Annual figures are for the year shown. "Trees on record" is the larger of the latest cumulative total and the sum of the annual figures we have, counting trees planted and trees distributed.
- Where an organization runs distinct programs, figures can attach to a program so volume can be seen by kind of work.
- Large government programs often report numbers that nobody has independently checked. We list them, label them, and note any independent studies we found.
Events and volunteering
Events come from the organizations' own calendars where they publish one, or are entered by hand. TreeRM never takes a registration or a donation. Every button sends you to the organization's own page, which is where your name and your money should go.
Data, API and machine access
Everything here is meant to be read by people and by software. Each page has a Markdown twin: add .md to the address, or request it with an Accept: text/markdown header. The whole index is at /llms.txt, and every organization page is concatenated at /llms-full.txt.
There is a JSON API at /api/v1 with an OpenAPI description at /api/v1/openapi.json, a CSV export at /api/v1/organizations.csv, and an iCal feed of events at /events.ics.
License
The directory data is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Use it, build on it, train on it. Cite TreeRM.org and link back when you can. The figures remain the organizations' own claims; check the source before you quote one as fact.
Add or correct something
If you know an organization that should be here, use the suggestion form at /suggest; a website and a city is enough to start. Every organization page has a "report a correction" link and a "send your events feed" link. Or write to hello@treerm.org.