The Last Trees of Malé

About the register

Malé is one of the most densely built cities on earth. Its trees are the last of a shoreline ecology that once covered the whole island.

Why record trees at all

A tree that disappears from a street corner leaves almost no trace in any public record. There is no register you can consult to find out what stood on Majeedhee Magu twenty years ago, how old it was, or who planted it. That knowledge lives in people's memories and in the backs of family photographs, and it goes when they do.

This is an attempt to write some of it down first. Two things get recorded at once.

What the four statuses mean

Standing
Alive and in place as of the last check.
Under threat
A specific, documented risk: a permit, a notice, or works already underway. A general worry does not qualify.
Cut back
Still alive, but most of its canopy has been taken. Councils and utilities remove large parts of a crown for road works, building access and power lines, and a tree that keeps its trunk but loses its shade is not the same tree. Counted with the losses rather than with the standing trees, because counting it as standing would hide exactly what this register exists to show.
Lost
Cut down or removed. This is the status that needs evidence most: a date, and ideally a photograph or a named source.
Relocated
Moved rather than felled. Counted apart from standing trees, because a transplanted mature tree often dies, and counting it as a save would overstate what happened.

The map

Building shapes on the map come from OpenStreetMap. Of the 951 buildings mapped in Malé, 74 record a height or a storey count; the rest are drawn at an assumed height. Read the massing as a picture of density, not as a survey. Tree positions are a different matter: those are recorded coordinates, and where a record is approximate it says so.

Verification

Every record carries a verification flag, and everything starts life unverified. A record becomes verified when someone has stood in front of the tree, or has checked a loss against a dated photograph or a named source. Unverified records stay visible rather than being held back, and each one carries a label. Do not quote one as fact.

Submissions are moderated before they appear, so the register stays something you could put in front of a council.

How to contribute

  1. Photograph the tree, the whole thing if you can, trunk and canopy both.
  2. Note where it is. A street name or a landmark is plenty; exact coordinates are a bonus, not a requirement.
  3. Send it through the add a tree form. No account, no sign-up.

If you are recording a tree that was cut down, the most useful thing you can supply is an old photograph with a date on it. Family albums and old phone backups are where most of this evidence still lives.

Privacy

Licence

The tree records are published under CC BY-SA 4.0 so that researchers, journalists and the council can reuse them freely, provided they credit the contributors and share alike. Photographs remain the property of whoever took them and are published with their permission. Base map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Accessibility

This site is built to WCAG 2.1 AA. It works with a keyboard alone, at 200% zoom, in high-contrast mode, and with a screen reader in both English and Dhivehi. Everything on the map is also in the register. If something does not work for you, that is a bug. Please report it.

Add a tree