Tree planting is expanding across sub-Saharan Africa, spurred by the demand for tree products and new environmental policies. Identifying key actors is important for land use theory and for determining whether tree planting can improve rural livelihoods while contributing to environmental goals. To date, tree-planting analyses focus on obvious actors: large-scale businesses (plantations) and rural smallholders (woodlots). However, absentee, urban-based domestic investors are also engaged. Using southern Tanzania as a case study, we attribute tree planting across plantations and woodlots then analyze the potential contribution of the absentee landowners (absentee treefarms). We quantified plantations’ extent by creating and manually verifying a spatial database of planted areas (ca. 2019). We estimated woodlots’ extent by performing a bootstrap extrapolation of average woodlot area based on field surveys of 3436 smallholders across 163 villages. We estimated absentee treefarms’ extent based on interviews with village leaders (n = 36). We corroborated plantations, woodlots, and absentee treefarms against total planted tree cover as observed from remote sensing. The plantations database corresponded well to remote sensing (R = 0.82), but less so for woodlots (R = 0.48). A linear model with only plantations and woodlots explained 38% of the remotely sensed planted tree cover while one that included absentee treefarms explained 54%. Unexplained variation is partly due to omission errors for woodlots: 57% of villages (n = 88) had more woodlots based on interview estimates than based on remote sensing analysis. Villages with far more remotely sensed planted trees compared to interview estimates (11%, n = 17) included absentee treefarm sites. Our findings reveal the role of absentee, urban-based domestic investors in tree planting. More broadly, we show that trees planted in rural areas, even in small patches (5–500 ha) are not necessarily owned by rural residents. Land use attribution must incorporate absentee owners. Similarly, funding for tree planting, particularly when intended to alleviate rural poverty, must address who benefits and not just where tree planting occurs. We recommend triangulating remote sensing with field assessments to attribute ownership to improve the equity and efficacy of tree-planting campaigns.

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