KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – Do you have a really big tree on your farm? In your neighborhood? If so, the University of Tennessee wants to know about it as it might be a National Champion Tree. Currently, the biggest tree in the country is General Sherman, a giant Sequoia on the West Coast. It’s over 27 feet in diameter.

The National Champion Tree Program (NCTP) recently announced the new Register of Champion Trees, the first since 2021. In 2023 the program moved from the American Forests to the University of Tennessee (UT) School of Natural Resources. UT has spent the past year working with state-level Champion Tree Programs to update records and verify newly crowned champions. The new Register can be found online nationalchampiontree.org.

The program was started in the 1940s when American Forests was a nonprofit. In 2021 they realized it no longer aligned with their larger organizational goals, said Jaq Payne, NCTP director at UT. They took a couple of years searching for a new home for the program before selecting UT.

Payne had been running the Tennessee Champion Tree Program for a while. Most states have champion programs, but some are not well funded and not very active. The trees are so cool and interesting that Payne thought the program had more potential.

“I thought we could be doing more with public education engagement,” he said. “We put together a marketing plan and started a social media campaign. That immediately doubled the amount of nominations that we were receiving. Once we expanded our reach, and did the social media campaign, we saw over 100 nominations from really broad areas where people previously had not heard of the program.”

The trees are sorted by species in the 2024 register. It also lists which ones are publicly accessible. It is a list of the largest documented trees of each species in the continental United States. Puerto Rico recently joined the program. They will be included in the next register. A register is done every two years. There will be some changes in 2026, Payne said.

“We have expanded the list of eligible species to over 1,200 now,” Payne said. “We are including for the first time what I am calling culturally important non-native species just because these might be the biggest species, especially in an urban environment, that somebody gets to encounter.”

There is some controversy because the program is honoring some invasive species, Payne said. However, it is a rule that a tree must be a state champion before becoming a national champion. So, states will have control over what gets honored in their state.

The goal is to document all the largest trees of a species and some of those champions are very small, Payne said. They are only impressive if you know how big those trees usually get. The two smallest are co-champion Southern Bayberries in Virginia.

“In the photos, the arborist’s hand is wrapped around the trunk so it is not very big in diameter,” Payne said. “They don’t look remarkable unless you know what a Southern Bayberry usually looks like.”

“All of the champion trees, large or small, get one point for each foot of height, one point for each inch of circumference, and a quarter-point for each foot of crown spread,” he said. “So those little ones both have 24 points and General Sherman has 1,325 points – quite a range.”

Each state has its own Champion Tree register. By comparison, in Indiana, the largest tree on the register is a Silver Maple in Lawrence County. It is 103 feet tall, has a trunk circumference of 361 inches, and an average canopy spread of 106 feet. Its total score is 490.5, said Jacob Roos, community & urban forestry director for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.

“We maintain our own list that is separate from the National Champion list but we use all the same measuring standards that the National Champion list does,” Roos said. “We only recognize trees that are native to the state of Indiana. Everything else is the same between the two lists.”

Indiana has 101 native trees but the state doesn’t have a Champion Tree for every species. For information on Indiana’s Champion Trees go to on.IN.gov/big-tree.

Both Roos and Payne agree that measuring the trees can be challenging. In an urban area, buildings and fences can interfere. In rural areas, trees might be on a steep bank or otherwise hard to reach area. Payne knew of one Champion Tree that was a four-day hike from civilization.

The Champion Tree program will be taking nominations for new champions on its website through August 2025. The list of eligible tree species for the 2025-2026 register will be released at the end of January and is expected to include more than 1,200 species of trees native and naturalized in the United States, an increase over the 900 species eligible for the 2024 register.

The NCTP’s mission is to protect, preserve, and keep a record of the largest trees in the United States through public education and engagement.