How tree heights are measured from space

When a homeowner drops a pin on a tree, your online estimator looks up its height in the background — this explains where that number comes from.

Aerial elevation data, not a photo guess

The height isn’t read off a picture. It comes from aerial elevation surveys of the ground and everything growing on it, the same kind of public mapping data used for flood plains and terrain models. For the spot where the pin landed, the estimator works out how tall whatever’s growing there is, how wide its crown is, and how far it sits from the nearest building.

What the homeowner sees

Alongside the height, they see a confidence figure — how sure the estimator is that the pin landed on a real tree and measured it correctly, and where that reading came from. A high-confidence reading gets treated as correct unless the homeowner corrects it; either way, they always get the chance to confirm or adjust it before moving on.

The data can be a few years old

Elevation surveys aren’t refreshed constantly — a given area’s data can be a couple of years old, sometimes more. Trees keep growing in the meantime, so the estimator adds a small adjustment for expected growth since the survey was flown. The homeowner’s own confirmation at the pin step is the real correction mechanism — if a tree looks taller or shorter to them than what’s shown, their answer is what the quote uses.

When there’s no coverage

Not every location has elevation data good enough to trust, and when the confidence comes back too low, the estimator doesn’t pretend otherwise. It falls back to asking the homeowner to describe the tree’s size themselves. The flow never stalls waiting on data that isn’t there.

No imagery is ever stored

Nothing about this process saves a picture of the property. What gets kept is the pin’s coordinates and the numbers derived from them — height, confidence, source, and the age of the survey used. If you look at a lead’s tree pins later in your dashboard, that map is drawn fresh from those saved coordinates each time you open it, not from a stored snapshot.

What to watch out for

A low-confidence or self-reported height isn’t a bug — it’s the estimator being honest about a real gap in coverage, and it’s exactly what the homeowner’s own confirmation step exists to fix. If your prices in a particular area look consistently off, it’s worth checking whether that area tends to fall back to self-report often.