Inspection Cycles and Work Programmes

Planning and carrying out annual inspection cycles and work programmes form the core of tree management systems. OTISS supports all stages of the Tree Management process.

  • Many landowners get an independent Arboricultural Consultant to carry out a complete survey every few years – typically every 4 or 5 years. The consultant will inspect each tree, will make a series of recommendations of work to be carried out and will assign a priority or time scale to each one.
  • For risk management purposes, it is considered best practice to group trees into zones; where each zones is assigned a risk category (e.g. high, medium or low). For high risk zones, an annual inspection cycle is recommended. The inspection cycle for the for lower risk zones typically ranges between 2 and 5 years.
  • Zoning is also useful, when setting up a rolling programme of inspection cycles and maintenance work. An effective rolling programme should result in a healthier tree stock and more predictable budgets.
  • The landowner (or consultant) will then create a multi-year work programme. This plan will be driven by the consultant’s recommendations, but will also be influenced by a range of other factors including; budget constraints, development plans for the property; the opinions/concerns of neighbours, etc. These plans are essential when managing external contractors and also your own staffs time.

Using your own staff…

  • Between these inspection cycles, the trees may suffer from storm damage, collisions, fallen branches, disease. Your staff (groundsmen, caretaker, facilities manager, etc.) may require further maintenance work or inspections to be carried out on individual trees – calling upon Arboricultural Consultants or contractors as required.
  • The Tree Survey (Android) application makes it very convenient for staff to use their mobile phone to create new inspection records and work items – especially when they are on-site and notice something that needs attending to.

Tree Surveys and Inspections

An OTISS ‘survey’ is created to plan and carry out an inspection cycle on a selected set of trees. If outside consultants are being used, then they can be assigned to the survey so that the have online access to the required maps, location and history. This ‘survey‘ record contains general information about aims, restrictions, weather on the day, overall findings, etc. Whereas an ‘inspection‘ record is stored for each tree; this includes inspection date, inspector’s name, measurements, overall condition, detailed survey notes, inspection cycle, recommendations and time scales. See the full listing of tree survey/inspection data stored by OTISS for each tree.

  • Traditionally, tree inspections have been carried out using pen and paper. Using OTISS, previous reports can be printed before the survey and then amended on-site. Data collected in this way can be entered directly into OTISS via any Web browser.
  • Inspections can also be carried out using your mobile phone or tablet (only Android at present). With the Tree Survey Android application, you can view, update and create new tree inspections. The maps and data are synchronised between OTISS and your phone.
  • If you or your consultants are using specialised mobile survey devices for collecting data, then in the future we hope to be able to import/export maps and data to these devices.

All new tree inspections are linked to the current active/open survey for that site/zone. When this survey is set to the ‘closed’ state. then these records are effectively frozen. Over the years, the survey records provide an audit trail that will help fulfil your legal ‘duty-of-care’ obligations. A new survey is then created for the next inspection cycle, or as a basis for any ad-hoc inspections/work.

Tree Works Programmes

When all the data has been collected from the surveys, it can be used to plan your work programme and next inspection cycles. If required, further data processing can be carried out by downloading the data into an Excel spreadsheet.

  • PDF reports for the survey and work schedules can be created containing coloured charts, graphs and tables (examples below).
  • The spreadsheet pageallows you to search and sort your data using multiple criteria. For example:
    • “show those trees on a particular site that need work doing on them this year”,
    • “show all trees that are due for inspection within the next 6 months”,
  • The map page allows you see which trees have been inspected as part of a particular survey.