This page provides a step by step guide to arboricultural consultants using OTISS to help them provide their services.

1. Sign up for an Arboricultural Consultant account with OTISS.
2. Create client estates for each of your clients.
3. Create sites and zones that describe the layout of the client’s estates.
4. Carry out tree and safety surveys on the estate.
5. Make use of the OTISS reports and data to help create and augment your own reports.

1. Register for an OTISS account

Free 30 day period to evaluate the OTISS features and services.

• First you must register with OTISS for a Arboricultural Consultant account. If you have staff that also need to use OTISS, then each one should register for a ‘Consultant’ account.

2. Client Estates

You create a new client estate to store the information, maps, surveys for each of your clients.

• When working with other consultants, you can let them have access to the client estate or you can assign then to work on specific surveys.
• As an extra service to your clients, your can create an OTISS ‘client’ account for them and grant them access the maps, data and reports that you have stored in OTISS.

3. Sites and Risk Assessment Zones

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.

• Sites are used as convenient ways to manage the trees. Reports and data queries can be based on sites. Surveys are carried out on a per-site basis.
• The OTISS site record includes; description, location/address (e.g. for access) and contact information (e.g. key holders).
• Sites can also be used as ‘risk zones‘ as part of a Tree Safety Policy. A site/zone is allocated a Risk Category of high, medium or low.
• Currently OTISS provides online maps to show the positions of the sites and trees. Future versions of OTISS will allow you to upload detailed site plans.

4. Tree Surveys

Once you have created your initial sites, you create an OTISS ‘survey‘ for each one and appoint yourself (or other users) to carry them out.

• You can use the OTISS website and/or the Tree Survey Android application to plot the positions of the trees on the online maps.
• OTISS has many fields that may not be relevant to your requirements, these can be left blank or a ‘Not Recorded’ value entered.
• Groups of trees may initially be plotted as a single unit; particular trees within the group may subsequently be plotted individually if the need arises.
• Although not all the trees will need to have detailed records, using OTISS and GPS enabled mobile phones and devices, it very easy to view previous inspection records, to update the records, or simply mark the tree as ‘inspected’.
• You can enter recommendations concerning safety and long term management of the trees.
• By setting the survey(s) to the ‘closed’ state, your effectively lock the inspections from further changes.
• If you have existing spreadsheets, databases, KMLs or shapefiles with relevant tree or inspection data, we may be able to load these into OTISS. Please contact us for more information on what can be done.

5. Maps, Spreadsheets and Reports of tree inspection data

• OTISS maintains an audit trail of all surveys, tree inspections and maintenance work. Dates, names (inspectors and contractors), locations, descriptions, results etc. are all recorded.
• The inventory and inspection data can be viewed and updated from any Web browser. The spreadsheet page allows you to search and sort your data using multiple criteria. For example:
  • “show me all trees on a particular site that need work doing on them”,
  • “show me all trees that are overdue for their next inspection”,
  • “list all the oak trees and order them by age class”.
• PDF Reports can be created containing coloured charts, graphs and tables. Summary and Details reports and Survey Recommendations can be generated at any time.
• All the inspection data can be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet. This can be useful for further detailed analyse or customised reporting.
• High quality maps and printouts can be prepared using your own CAD application to combine your maps and site plans with the CAD/DXF files (provided by OTISS) of the tree locations.