Level 1 tree assessment

[guymayor]

Graham,if you look at it, it sounds like a Level II is what's talked about here. when the ANSI standard was being written, it was left pretty loose-- for instance, the need for a hand tool to find the flare was downgraded to the statement that its use "shall not be precluded", etc. Level II is basically a walkaround taking a few notes.

You're right about cities and arborists needing to define the assignment; that is often too vague. imo there needs to be an understanding about extra time taken on high value trees before rendering opinions on care. Your 20% plan sounds reasonable.

What are 'more apparent problems"? How do these differ from "more significant problems"?

 

[buck588]

Davey is using their own software, a program called treekeeper. Its definitely not something you would mess with unless your continuously managing large populations of trees. The City I work for has been using this program since the late 90's to manage our inventory data, I really like it, and I use the mobile version on the tablet daily.

To Guys point about crazy recommendations, there is some truth to that as it is usually pretty green employee's doing their inventory work, but it is really up to the municipality to define the info they want, and how they want it reported back to them. This should help focus those recommendations. While we can argue the semantics of knowing what is specifically a defect or the severity of that defect all day long my take on managing trees for a municipality dealing with thousands of trees is this type of assessment is primarily about triage, and finding the trees showing the more apparent problems. I would love to hear from Guy or some of the other municipal guys, what there suggestion would be for the best approach to performing risk assessments on large populations of trees. I know I personally find it unrealistic to do much more then a level one, and based on those findings, a few more focused level 2 assessments on more then about 20% of our inventory annually.

Actually Davey does not use Treekeeper!! They produce it but in the field they use arcgis software with city map overlays! Treekeeper can be great management software but has problems!! Davey helped The City of Denver do an inventory and their plant ID was pretty bad by some employees. But there has got to be a reason Davey does not use Davey Treekeeper in the field


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[matdand]

Graham,if you look at it, it sounds like a Level II is what's talked about here. when the ANSI standard was being written, it was left pretty loose-- for instance, the need for a hand tool to find the flare was downgraded to the statement that its use "shall not be precluded", etc. Level II is basically a walkaround taking a few notes.

This is what the TRA manual states: ''The scope of work may, in some cases, specify that you must walk around certain trees to gain a more complete perspective, although this alone would be insufficiant to elevate the assessment to Level 2.''

This is the sentence that made me use the level 1 term, because I would be looking at the complete tree without going into depth about ''significant defects'' (probing in a cavity for instance).

 

[guymayor]

O OK. The Levels are pretty arbitrary anyway. Level III often means "we forgot to load that tool", "we're out of time" or "I think we can jack up the price if we call it Level III."