Consultants and tree tags - why

[aspenarb]

Just pricing a very large job with multiple large trees to fell, trees plotted wrong On maps identified wrong in report and when On site hard to identify which 3 are to fell from a group of closely Growing mature beech made harder by the fact 6 are marked with big crosses meaning fell! Spoke to the consultant who's solution was price which I think it should be and if I get it he will come out and tell me which it is, this could be @a vast difference in cost as some will fell and some will be a dismantle. Pulse over 80 trees in woodland area which are impossible to identify and again will be decided On award of contract so having to work it out on worsed case scenario.

 

Then when and if you win the contract you have the whole task to do again when you have to show the lads the job. I had a brain wave a few years ago and bought a hand held gps. I spent a day looking at this contract and plotted the tree positions by their coordinates. Its quick and simple with no chance of mistakes but my enthusiasm was not shared with the lads who never embraced the idea. ( too many buttons for the meat heads).

 

Bob

[Paul Barton]

Then when and if you win the contract you have the whole task to do again when you have to show the lads the job. I had a brain wave a few years ago and bought a hand held gps. I spent a day looking at this contract and plotted the tree positions by their coordinates. Its quick and simple with no chance of mistakes but my enthusiasm was not shared with the lads who never embraced the idea. ( too many buttons for the meat heads).

 

Bob

 

Check out Proximitree on the web. They supply ready made tree maps saving you the trouble of capturing them with GPS.

[aspenarb]

Check out Proximitree on the web. They supply ready made tree maps saving you the trouble of capturing them with GPS.

 

Thanks thats worth a look. I was more concerned with the the odd trees dotted about on some of these huge estates, one in particular is a 6000 acre estate and I just thought the gps thing would have been a good idea but I was the only one that did.

 

Bob

[Philip Anderson]

I don't think there is anything wrong get with giving a client options. There are many trees that could be retained by heavy reductions but retaining trees with defects has a long term cost implication for the client. I would rather inform a client that some action needs to be taken in order to reduce a risk and let them decide how to spend their money...once they are fully informed of the management implications.

 

I'm not necessarily condoning a woolly recommendation such as "fell or reduce" but I think tree surveyors have to accept that clients don't always have the resources to do exactly what we'd like them to do. In which case options can be given to help them decide.

 

Point taken ,but as I read the post it was a competitive tender for works so no room for ambiguity otherwise how can you compare like with like tenders,its too open ended especially for a local authority who should know better .

[Gary Prentice]

We did a local school recently.

 

When they rang us for a quote there were 40 /50 trees.

The school were to provide tags made by the students so i told them to do 60 or so to be sure they had plenty.

 

They couldn't understand why i was asking for extra money when the total number of trees topped the 100 mark.

there were also a couple of areas we'd designated as 'area of young *******' whatever species they happened to be.

 

We're also starting a large ish (for us) job on monday where a large, established tree company has surveyed the site (approx 80 trees) and not tagged. The location map of the site is on a sheet of A4 and you'd need an Electron Microscope to read it.

The Surveying tree Co. are happy to provide us with a larger scale plan, and its only going to cost us £250 +vat !!!! Very generous of them.

 

If you get it as a PDF, upload it to Zanbar and convert it to a JPeg, download it and then enlarge it in sections. I print them to A4 and laminate them for longer jobs.