LURU Trees · Bengaluru

Where Bengaluru still has trees.

Bengaluru canopy across four year ranges

2021–25

dry-season map

Loading the map

Hold the map to compare with 2001–05

Search by a familiar neighbourhood or one of the 198 BBMP ward names. No location permission needed.

2001–05 · Where green appeared

This is where the green sits.

One square is about 340 metres wide. The green is not spread evenly. It gathers inside defence compounds, campuses, Palace grounds and big parks.

2006–10 · Drier years

Rain can change the whole picture.

Trees are only part of what looks green from space. Grass, scrub and fields respond quickly to rain. In dry years, the map can lose colour without losing the same amount of tree cover.

2016–20 · Wetter years

Green comes back into the reading.

That does not mean all those trees grew back. A separate annual satellite series shows that rainfall moves the result too. Wetter ground changes what appears from space.

2021–25 · Latest years

The same pockets still stand out.

Jalahalli. Agaram. The Palace. IISc. Lalbagh and Cubbon Park. Different years, same basic pattern: Bengaluru's reliable green is concentrated in land that has not been built over.

Places that still hold green

Tap a marked place to see what kept it green. Lalbagh · Cubbon · Palace · IISc ≈ · GKVK ≈ · Turahalli · ASC Agram · Jalahalli AFS · MEG · HAL

Beyond the city reading

Bengaluru’s boundary cuts through a larger landscape.

Pull back to see four large holdings at the edge of the map. They are shown only as published boundaries; we have no canopy reading for the land outside our Bengaluru frame.

Bengaluru, 1963–2025

Bengaluru changed one named place at a time

The years here come from orders, court records, published research and reported accounts. They are a documentary timeline, separate from the satellite readings above.

The map marks named records, not measured canopy change

Government, court or first-hand recordPublished researchReported account

1963 · Published research

Dharmambudhi tank bed became Majestic

KSRTC received 1,36,294 square yards of the tank bed. The terminus began in the early 1960s; the familiar semicircular building came later.

Correction: The land transfer was in 1963, not 1980.

See the record: Arcadia, Nagendra and Unnikrishnan

What this story found

What this story found

Bengaluru's green is not spread evenly.It gathers inside defence compounds, campuses, Palace grounds and big parks.

Trees can cool a street by 5.6°C.In a paired-road study, afternoon air under trees was up to 5.6°C cooler.

BBMP reports 15,317 hectares lost.BBMP's climate plan reports 15,317 hectares of canopy lost during 2001–22.

Where green stays

Bengaluru's reliable green gathers inside large holdings.

Defence land. University campuses. Palace grounds. Lalbagh and Cubbon Park. These large holdings retained open ground while the surrounding city built up. They kept many trees too.

Agaram

54.8%

The highest persistent-canopy figure in the 198-ward map. Much of its green comes from two ASC defence parcels and part of the Iblur military woodland.

Padarayanapura

0.0%

No persistent canopy was recorded in our recent dry-season map. IISc's field census also recorded very few trees there a decade earlier.

LURU Trees ward analysis, cross-checked against IISc's 2014 Trees of Bengaluru census

5.6°C

cooler afternoon air, at most

Trees cool the air people feel

On a Bengaluru street, a tree is not decoration.

In a study of twenty paired Bengaluru road segments, afternoon air under trees was cooler by as much as 5.6°C. Road surfaces were cooler by as much as 27.5°C. Anyone who has waited at a signal in April knows why this matters.

Vailshery, Jaganmohan and Nagendra, 2013

Rain changes a satellite reading

A good monsoon can make the whole city look greener.

Rain wakes up grass, scrub, fields and leaf cover before a satellite passes overhead. In our separate annual reading, rainfall explains about 23% of the movement in what looked green from space. So a wetter map does not automatically mean more trees.

The rain is also becoming less predictable.

Karnataka's climate plan and the IPCC Atlas point in the same direction: more variable rain, with heavier downpours. Hot dry gaps will matter more. So will every patch of shade the city keeps.

Land pressure reaches every open patch

Every empty-looking piece of land in Bengaluru has a price.

Across Bengaluru's wards, built-up area and reliable canopy have a correlation of −0.77. Karnataka revised the city's property-registration guidance values in 2023. That does not prove a price cut a particular tree. It records pressure on land without claiming a cause.

The city's climate plan says Bengaluru lost 15,317 hectares of tree-cover canopy during 2001–22.

This is BBMP's own number. The warning is already in the city's plan: Bengaluru is losing the trees that cool its streets.

Bengaluru Climate Action and Resilience Plan · LURU Trees ward analysis · Karnataka guidance-value circulars

What the law allowed, and people challenged

On paper, every tree needs permission. In practice, almost every request passed.

The tree case shaping permissions

Bangalore Environment Trust's WP 17841/2018 produced a Tree Expert Committee, a census order, a public-objection window and a 2022 bar on new metro tree-felling permissions. The case changed how applications are handled.

Start where you live

Find your neighbourhood. Then see what Bengaluru has already defended.

Search by a familiar neighbourhood or one of the 198 BBMP ward names. No location permission needed.

Steel flyover · 2017

A public count changed the project.

Citizens and researchers counted the trees on the route. After a citywide campaign, the government scrapped the flyover.

Read the tree count

Sarakki lake · 2014–15

The High Court ordered public land cleared.

After encroachment covered part of the lake bed, the court ordered clearance. The recovery drive began in April 2015.

Read the Sarakki record

Devanahalli · 2025

A 1,198-day protest kept farms from acquisition.

The Karnataka government cancelled acquisition of 1,777 acres across 13 villages after farmers sustained their protest for more than three years.

Read the farmers’ account

LURU will keep following the land, the trees and the people who defend them.

Check every claim

References and further reading

Every study, public record, map source and reported account linked in the story appears here. “LURU analysis” means a figure calculated from the files named in the technical method.

Data used in the maps

Bengaluru studies and official records

Law, courts and public plans

Other-city sources

Read the technical method

Main Bengaluru film

Four Landsat dry-season composites feed the film: 2001–05, 2006–10, 2016–20 and 2021–25. Their citywide canopy readings are 20.5%, 15.3%, 24.4% and 30.4% of valid pixels. We do not join them into a trend because sensor, rainfall and scene mix change.

Within each of 198 BBMP wards, blocks are ordered by how consistently their Landsat pixels read as canopy. Ward totals stay fixed. The display stops at 338 m because smaller blocks fall inside the measured co-registration error.

Canopy totals move by about ±8 percentage points when the NDVI threshold shifts from 0.35 to 0.45. The planned 100-point visual validation sample remains unfilled. This is an editorial satellite reading, not a tree census.

Five-city comparison

All five city maps use ESA WorldCover 2021 v200. Each city is projected into its local northern WGS 84 UTM zone. A block is kept when at least half intersects the published boundary, then receives the dominant WorldCover class among source pixels inside it.

WorldCover’s class names are not tree-canopy percentages. The Bengaluru comparison map is never compared numerically with the Landsat film.

Files behind the figures

  • research/bangalore-trees/data/processed/cell_persistence_338.json
  • research/bangalore-trees/data/processed/ward_canopy_v020.csv
  • research/bangalore-trees/data/processed/city_atlas_manifest.json
  • research/bangalore-trees/data/processed/city_atlas_audit.json
  • research/bangalore-trees/data/processed/tree_census_manifest.json
  • Context Docs/luru-trees/01-DATA-FINDINGS.md