Taipei City’s tree canopy area has decreased by 13.7 hectares in two years. Researchers are worried that the city government says that trees are not cut down randomly.

Recently, many road trees in Taipei City have been cut down, sparking discussions from all walks of life. Shen Shengfeng, a researcher at the Biodiversity Research Center of Academia Sinica, pointed out that based on calculations from satellite images, the tree canopy area in Taipei City has decreased by 13.7 hectares in the past two years, and the reduction in the second year was greater than in the first year. This is frankly worrying. In response, the North City Parks Department responded that the areas with reduced tree crowns include national university campuses, national highway interchanges and other developments, and it is clear that the city government did not cut down trees at will.

Shen Shengfeng said on Facebook that in order to understand the status of tree felling in Taipei City, they made a systematic calculation based on the Sentinel-2 satellite images of the European Space Agency (ESA). They combined multiple images from the same season every year to determine the tree canopy area, and separately counted the junction zones between the inner city streets and the mountainside woodlands to prevent the vast mountain forests from covering up the subtle changes in the city.

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As a result, the loss of tree crowns in Bei City was even more surprising than expected. Within the city streets alone, the tree crown area dropped from 628 hectares in 2024 to 615 hectares in 2026, a net decrease of 13.7 hectares in two years, and the reduction in the second year was greater than the first year.

If roughly converted to a crown of about 10 square meters per tree, this is equivalent to the crowns of more than 13,000 trees disappearing from the urban area. Drawing the reduced location on the map, the red dots cover almost the entire basin, not just concentrated in a few places.

However, Shen Shengfeng emphasized that what the satellite saw were changes in land cover and could not tell whether it was cutting down, transplanting, pruning or typhoons. They did not intend to draw conclusions about these figures. "But no matter what the reason is, in an era when everyone is talking about carbon reduction and biodiversity, it is difficult not to be worried when seeing the capital's tree canopy getting smaller year by year."

In response to this, the Parks Department of the Taipei City Government issued a statement. After comparing relevant data, it stated that the reasons for the large reduction in tree canopy area pointed out in the report include private land development, the development of National Taiwan University campus, the reduction of green shade at national highway interchanges, and other cases involving central construction. , obviously not caused by the city government's arbitrary cutting of trees; the Parks Department emphasized that the city government's actual practice of trees has only increased. In the past two years, more than 13,000 trees have been added, and another 3,555 trees will be added to the urban area next year. It is also willing to communicate with Researcher Shen's team and jointly promote the construction of Taipei's green foundation.