Arb Mag Data Article-Blog LinkedIn-LF

At the Arboricultural Association Conference in 2025, our Director Luke Fay joined with Hannah Walker of Forest Research and Joe Fennell of JF Scientific to led workshops with #Arboriculturist exploring the opportunities and obstacles of employing the tree data collected and held by organisations across the UK and Ireland to inform better understanding and management of trees.

The workshops built on our industry-research collaboration with the The Open University and Joe Fennell which resulted in the publication of a first draft of the Handbook of Urban Tree Allometry and an initial version of an aggregated dataset of individual tree records: the #OpenBARD dataset. These have achieved over 3,000 downloads, showing the widespread enthusiasm for high-quality tree data and tools derived from it.

The outcomes of the workshops are now presented in the Arboricultural Association’s Arb Magazine (Spring 2026).

The article finfishes with this thought and call to action…

🌳 There are so many opportunities for engagement across the professions. Government bodies could support data hosting and sharing while research organisations develop new tools, analysis and guidance:

🌳 Software developers could enable data to be shared beyond their platforms,

🌳 Professional bodies support their members in participation.

🌳 Surveyors, consultants, volunteers, council officers and managers could all continue to collect the data they usually do, and receive regular insights derived from it.

🌳 It would be amazing if we were now looking back over the past 10 years and saying ‘Isn’t it brilliant that we started this dataset all of those years ago and look at all of the fantastic innovations that we have derived from it?’… but we can’t, so let’s do it now and in 10 years’ time we can look back with pride and look forward with confidence.