Walkover Surveys Workshop

Knowing the location and condition of every tree on an estate gives great comfort to the landowner or manager and enables proactive management to meet duty of care.

However, some landholdings are so vast and have such extensive wooded areas that recording a comprehensive tree inventory is not practical. Owners and managers of such complex estates still have a duty of care in law for public safety, so we have developed a Tree Risk Walkover Survey method that supports them to manage risks associated with trees.

The key is to manage these risks to a level that is as low as reasonably practicable within the constraints imposed by finite resources such as financial budgets and time.

This week we brought our industry leading team of tree consultants together for our monthly Team Training and held a workshop explore the complexities of Walkover Tree Risk Surveys, test our systems and our assumptions, share notes on good practice and difficulties that we have experienced and develop even better practice.

We reviewed our entire process, from the first enquiry that we receive from a concerned landowner, through the recording of our Land Occupation Survey in our MyTrees Tree Management Software to the delivery of useful information to the landowner.

We discussed the practicalities of inspecting only those trees that show signs of posing a significant risk among large groups of trees and we considered the benefits of this approach for landowners who could not find the resource to manage tree risk pro-actively in any other way.

Luke Fay, our Managing Director said: “I am always inspired when I spend time with this group of experts. Everyone brought great insights into the process, complexities and benefits of walkover tree risk surveys. And the training that we all gained from the day was second to none.”