Sites

OTISS lets you divide an estate into several ‘sites‘.  A ‘site’ could be a park, a field, a groups of fields, a property, a car park – whatever you want it to be.

• For each site you can store further contact and address information for site managers, caretakers, wardens, key holders, etc (as required). This per-site contact information is also available on the survey app when doing the on-site survey.
• On the map you can draw Site Boundaries to specify the exact ownership or legal boundaries of a site, or use the boundaries as a convenient way of splitting up a large estate or survey area.
• Surveys are always carried out on a per-site basis.
• Reports can be created for a specified site or for all the sites together.
• On the OTISS Map and Spreadsheet web pages, sites are used as a quick way of the viewing different parts of the estate.
• NB: Although there is no limit to the number of trees/items within each site. However, for performance reasons on the website and on the mobile survey devices or phones, it is best to restrict each site to less than 4000 trees.

Sites Table

Press the Sites button to goto the Sites webpage. This page has a table of all the sites for the estate.

• The ? Help button provide a quick reminder of how to use these features.
• The buttons along the top of the table are used to add new sites and manage the site maps.
• The button icons at the start of each row allow for edit and deletion of the sites.
• Pressing the buttons within a row will take you to the maps or surveys for that site.
• Use the Search button and click on the column headers to search, filter and sort the table.

For those estates that have lots of sites to manage, you can use the Sites table to plan the work required and when a re-survey is required. The Site table shows:-

• The # Items column shows the number of trees/groups and furniture items.
• The # Works column shows the number of un-completed work items – i.e. recommendations with a timescale.
• The Last Active column shows when trees/items were last plotted, inspected or updated.
• The Re Survey date suggests when the next survey is due – based on the Start Date of the most recent survey and the Inspection Cycle period configured for the Site Edit form.

Each OTISS ‘site’ record includes;

• A name and general description of the site, including notes on access arrangements.
• Address/location information of the site and the access point.
• Contact information (name, telephone, email) for the site manager, caretaker, warden or key holder.
• An uploaded site plan or map in PDF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GeoTIFF formats – or simply use the online world maps.
  • When a site is linked to a geo-referenced map, then it (and its surveyed items) can be viewed on the map which is overlaid on top of the world map. The trees and items can be ploted using the GPS in your mobile device.
  • When a site is linked to a non geo-referenced plan (e.g. PDF), then it (and its surveyed items) can only be viewed on the plan, and not on the real-world maps. GPS cannot be used on these sites.

Transferring sites from one Client to another.

For Premium Arb Consultants subscriptions only. Occasionally, a site is created in one client and later it may need to be transferred to a different client. On the Sites webpage, the Transfer Sites button allows you to move one or more sites from this client to another client. Transferring a site will transfer ALL the associated surveys, trees, assets, inspections, photos and maps.

Tree Safety Zones

For users with the Tree Safety subscription, sites should also be used as ‘risk zones‘ as part of your Tree Safety Policy – in fact sites and zones are the same. A ‘risk zone’ could be a park, a group of streets, a school play ground, car park – whatever you want it to be. Often you may create 2 risk zones to cover a particular area – one high risk the other moderate risk.

• Site boundaries can be drawn on the map around each risk zone and coloured appropriate to the risk level.
• A site/zone is allocated a Risk Category of high, medium or low. The high risk category is recommended for ‘where there is frequent public access to trees‘ (e.g. in and around picnic areas, schools, children’s playgrounds, popular foot paths, car parks, or at the side of busy roads).

  

• The Inspection Period field allows you to specify the expected frequency of safety inspections for this Risk Zone, e.g. every year, every 3 years, etc. All the trees in the zone use this Inspection Period value, but you can also change an individual tree’s Inspection Period to deal with exceptional circumstances.

Further guidence on Tree Safety Policies and Risk Assessment Zones can be found in OTISS and HSE guidelines. and also in Common sense risk management of trees, National Tree Safety Group.

 

Site Boundaries

Site boundaries are optional polygons or lines drawn on the maps that you can use to show the extend of each site (or risk zone) within the estate. They can be used to define accurate ownership of land and properties, or as a rough guide to break a large estate into manageable sections. Simple sites would have a single polygon tracing the outline of the site (e.g. park, parish, field, woodland, etc), or a single line along a road or avenue of trees. More complex sites can have several polygons or lines as required.

The site boundaries and site names can be visible or hidden on the map as required – sometimes they just clutter the map when you want to focus on something else.

Site boundaries can be created, modified and deleted on the Maps web page and the mobile survey apps (similar to plotting the other assets, trees, groups, etc).  When you select a Survey Type of “Site Boundaries” then the ‘Site Tools:’ menu appears.

• Use the Site Tools to create, reshape or delete the boundaries as required.
• The line colour and width can be configured as part of the Site form (on the Sites web page).

Note: when creating site boundaries, please leave the “use in spatial queries” box un-ticked. For normal sites, the boundary is just as visual reference – see the Admin Sites section below for when to use this advanced feature.

On the mobile survey apps, the site boundaries are downloaded and sync’ed with the other data. They can be created, modified on the mobile survey map while carrying out the survey.

Admin Sites: Groups of Sites

For reporting and management purposes, it is often convenience to group several sites or risk zones together and view the assets/trees for all these sites. Within OTISS, this is achieved by creating extra Admin Sites and using the Site Boundaries feature.

Admin Sites are created in the same way as the normal sites. We recommend that Admin Sites never have Surveys and are never used directly to plot or survey trees – they are just used for admin purposes and reporting. Once created, an appropriate site boundary (or several distinct boundaries) is drawn for the Admin Site to enclose the required geographical areas, zones and sites. The crucial part is to make sure to tick the “use in spatial queries” box when creating/editing these boundaries. When an Admin Site is selected on the map, spreadsheet pages or reports, we use all the assets/trees that are geographically (spatially) within the boundaries – regardless of what sites/surveys the trees were part of.

We recommend that all the surveys are created and carried out on the ‘lower level’ sites. The Admin Sites have no surveys of their own, they are simply a management tool to represent various combinations of the lower level sites.