Airleaf: how clean is the air where you live?

Airleaf (airleaf.io) is a free website that shows the live air quality (AQI) for any address or city on Earth, tracks the forest every country and city has lost since 2001, and counts the trees around you from satellite images. It needs no account or sign-up.

Search your city or neighborhood above, or open the map and tap your street. Airleaf shows the current US AQI and the main pollutants — PM2.5, PM10, NO₂ and ozone — for that spot, with the past week's readings and how many trees it has.

The Air Quality Index turns pollution levels into one number on a scale from 0 to 500, which extreme smoke or dust can push past. 0–50 is Good, 51–100 Moderate, 101–150 Unhealthy for sensitive groups, 151–200 Unhealthy, 201–300 Very unhealthy, and above 300 Hazardous. Airleaf uses the US AQI scale.

PM2.5 is airborne particles 2.5 micrometres across or smaller, about 30 times thinner than a human hair. Most come from burning: traffic, industry, cooking and heating fuels, and wildfire or haze smoke. They are small enough to reach deep into the lungs, which is why PM2.5 sets the AQI on most bad-air days. Every Airleaf report shows the PM2.5 reading beside the AQI.

About 543 million hectares of tree cover from 2001 to 2025, 14% of the world's tree cover in 2000, by the satellite record of the University of Maryland's Global Forest Change maps. About 34% of it was cleared for good, mostly for farms, pasture and plantations; the rest burned, was logged or was cleared for a few seasons, and can grow back. Airleaf's deforestation pages break it down by country and city, year by year.

Brazil: about 56.2 million hectares of forest cleared for good since 2001, more than any other country, followed by Indonesia and Malaysia. Counting the forest that burned or was logged and can grow back as well, Russia lost the most tree cover overall: about 91.7 million hectares.

Trees trap dust and fine particles on their leaves and bark, and cool the street air that helps smog form. The effect is strongest where dense trees stand close to traffic, which is why Airleaf shows trees and air quality side by side.

Search your city or neighborhood above, or open the map and tap any point. Airleaf reads 10 m satellite images for the circle you choose and tells you how much tree cover it has, roughly how many trees that is, and how many more it would need.

Most urban forestry research lands on the 3-30-300 rule: three trees visible from every home, 30% tree cover in every neighborhood, and a park or green space within 300 meters. Airleaf turns that 30% target into a tree count for your exact area, and raises it where the air is poor.

Tree canopy is the layer of leaves and branches that shades the ground, seen from above. Foresters measure it as the share of an area covered by tree crowns. Airleaf calls it tree cover and measures it from satellite images.

Tree and green cover come from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 satellites at 10 m detail, air quality from ground monitoring stations via OpenAQ where available and otherwise the CAMS model via Open-Meteo, and national forest cover from the World Bank. Green cover is measured directly; telling trees apart from grass is an estimate, and lush grass can look like trees in wet seasons. Every result shows its satellite image date so you can check it.

No. You can search any place or tap anywhere on the map. If you open the map without a search, your browser asks whether to share your location — say no and it starts on a demo neighborhood instead.

Yes. Checking the air quality and trees of any place is free and needs no account. Airleaf is supported by donations, which pay for planting more trees.

Donate, or sponsor a planting as a company, school or group. Get in touch through our contact page and we'll reply with the details.