Query the USDA Forest Service Urban FIADB-API for a city's tree-canopy area estimates
domain: apps.fs.usda.gov · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Use the Urban FIADB-API endpoint (documented separately from the standard/rural /fiadb-api/fullreport endpoint at apps.fs.usda.gov/fiadb-api) rather than mixing rural and urban parameter sets.
Set geog to the specific urban FIA study-area/cycle identifier (e.g. a city+year code such as 'Baltimore2021Curr'), since urban inventories are organized per metro study rather than by state FIPS+year.
Set estnum to the desired urban estimate (e.g. 'Area of tree cover, in acres') and grps to a grouping category (e.g. 'FIA land use').
Request outputFormat=NJSON for a flat, machine-readable response suitable for downstream processing.
Confirm your target city has a completed urban FIA inventory before querying — not every U.S. city has urban plot data yet.
Known gotchas
Urban and rural FIADB-API share a similar interface style but use different parameter vocabularies (geog/estnum/grps vs wc/snum/rselected/cselected) — code is not directly portable between the two.
Urban FIA coverage is limited to cities USFS has specifically inventoried; querying an uncovered city returns no usable data rather than falling back to state-level estimates.
Like the rural endpoint, results are sampling-based population estimates with associated error, not a parcel-level tree inventory.
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