Where the Data Comes From

This is the heart of the project. Every pin submitted by a user represents someone who spotted a monkey puzzle, thought “that is extraordinary,” and took the time to photograph and report it. Locations usually come from the GPS in the spotter's device, so accuracy is typically within a few metres. You can also pin a location manually on the map, which is handy if, say, you find a black-and-white photo of a magnificent specimen in the loft and know exactly where it stands.

Photos are owned by the people who took them (see our Privacy page for details). Community sightings are the only source that includes photos and first-hand observations. If you have ever wondered what the monkey puzzle outside a chip shop in Dundee looks like at sunset, this is your dataset.

We may share anonymised sighting records (locations, dates, species details) with recognised conservation and biodiversity databases to support research. Your personal information is never included. Full details are in our Privacy page, and you can delete any sighting at any time.

The Anglo-Chilean Society celebrates the cultural, historical, and botanical connections between Britain and Chile. Through their Monkey Puzzle UK project, the Society has assembled a curated collection of photographs and records of notable specimens across Britain.

These records are imported with the Society's permission. Each entry has been editorially reviewed, not scraped from an API. Think of it as a carefully assembled guest list for the country's most distinguished trees.

Sarah Horton's Monkey Map was a community-driven project to catalogue monkey puzzle trees across the UK and beyond. Active from 2013 to 2016, it grew into one of the most comprehensive collections of its kind, with roughly 1,935 tree locations across nine regions.

What you get: a location pin, a place name, and in most cases a photograph. The data was originally curated via Google My Maps, and the photos are still hosted on Google's servers. Coverage is strongest across North West England, London and the South East, and Scotland, though there are entries from as far afield as New Zealand and Norway.

The blog is still online and well worth exploring. We include Sarah's data here as a tribute to the work she put into mapping these magnificent trees. If you recognise one of her entries, why not submit a fresh sighting with a new photo and keep the record alive?

GBIF is the world's largest biodiversity data network. Think of it as the most comprehensive guest list for the planet's species: museums, herbaria, universities, and citizen science platforms all contribute occurrence records. We query it specifically for Araucaria araucana records.

What you get: location, observation date, and sometimes a photo. Accuracy varies by contributing dataset. A record from a national herbarium will be pinpoint; one from a casual observation app might be approximate.

The City of Vancouver publishes a detailed inventory of its street trees and park trees. We filter for Araucaria araucana to pull in roughly three dozen public monkey puzzles across the city.

What you get: species, diameter, height, planting date, and address. This is surveyed municipal data, regularly updated by city arborists. It only covers the city's public trees, not private gardens, so the full Vancouver monkey puzzle population is certainly larger. But for the trees it does cover, the data is as reliable as any you will find.

OpenStreetMap is a community-built map of the world, and its contributors have tagged individual trees by species. We query the Overpass API for trees tagged as Araucaria araucana, which currently returns over 800 specimens worldwide.

What you get: location, and sometimes height, circumference, setting (street tree, park, garden), and planting date, where mappers have added that detail. Accuracy varies by contributor, but OSM's community review process means well-mapped areas are highly reliable. Less-mapped regions may have gaps.

The map tiles you see beneath the pins also come from OpenStreetMap, rendered by the project's tile servers. The same ODbL licence applies. Every time you pan the map, you are looking at the work of millions of volunteer mappers. The least we can do is say thank you.

No dataset is perfect. GPS can be off by a few metres. Municipal records may lag behind reality (trees get removed; new ones get planted). Volunteer mappers are human. Herbarium specimens were sometimes collected before GPS existed, so their coordinates are approximations. Community sightings usually get their location from the spotter's device GPS, though locations can also be pinned manually on the map if needed.

We can only correct Monkey Puzzle Watch community sightings directly. External sources (GBIF, Vancouver, OpenStreetMap, Monkey Map) are maintained by their respective communities and organisations, so if you spot an error in one of those, the best route is to report it upstream. If you spot something wrong with a Monkey Puzzle Watch sighting, please let us know. We would rather fix a dodgy pin than let it mislead someone into knocking on the wrong door to admire a tree.

Between all these sources, though, the coverage is remarkably good. A 200-million-year-old species, mapped by satellites, city arborists, biodiversity networks, and people who just really like trees. That feels about right.