Marcus B-T

I have made am bed on for mobile phones and cameras it measures dbh to plus or minus 1.5 cm and height to plus or minus 20 cm is this accurate enough? Thanks marcus

I have developed an app for excel and other platforms to measure dbh and height using a mobile phone camera or any other digital camera details from [email protected]

Why is such a large limb being taken off? Is there a photo?

the photos aren't great but it looks as though you have Necria canker and the leaf symptoms fit this, the scale are probably just the final straw. Check for swellings and small branches that look as though a chunk has been bitten out, this will confirm the presence. Locate the cankers and prune behind to healthy wood. Remove the cankered material and put in compost bin or burn. Don't bother with chemicals they don't work very well.

It's quite straight forward realy; all living things grow and adapt in tune with their environment. It is change that is the problem and the more dramatic the change the greater the potential strain on the organism. Anyone who is married with kids will know about that one. If you can adapt though, then you will survive though your morphology or physiology may be greatly changed. Nothing likes having bits chopped off, especially when it is an adaptation to your environment.

Roots can easily exert around 1MPa of pressure so a dry stone wall resting on the ground should be fine. I would be more worried about the long term stability of the wall, but I guess dry stone walls are designed to move about.

The strangest ones I have seen to date are where the rootstock has been so poor it has decayed away and the roots have been repleced by the scion. Make you wonder why they grafted it in the first place, also leaves a huge cavity at the base. Luckily it also seems to coincide with stunted canopy development.

As of today we have an infra red thermometer available for loan if anyone wants to try out BST. Marcus

I have a free demo version of TTMS BST available for anyone: interested, curious, wanting to show it doesn't work, other. e-mail [email protected] Regards Marcus

I have passed the version of THREATS in Excel over to Julian, so if you want a copy now is the time to contact him. Enjoy.

Thanks for the warning, Steve has always allowed me to do this kind of thing on the grounds that we give quite a bit of freebie info away and actual free stuff (the THREATS code is likely to come under this banner but I have posted other stuff in the past on Merripilus and Ustulina and the like), but if he changes his mind I will of course respect his wishes. Regards Marcus B-T

We have been able to secure some sponsorship so that we can offer full training in TTMS BST with the Infrared thermometer and a full year license with product support, for £1495. Training dates are Hampshire 22nd to 24th March, Nottingham 19th to 21st April, Edinburgh May 24th to 26th. Places are limited to 6 and we have already offered it to existing licensees first so places are severely limited it is first come first served though. Attached is some info on how it works. Regards Marcus my mob number is 07870 280235 TTMS BST summary.pdf

Just a little of what we are up to. TPL R&D Update Spring 2010.pdf

I saw some of the posts about computerised systems, and thought I would post this. Julian Forbes Laird has agreed to let me code THREATS into the TTMS system. There is potential therefore for it to be made available as a desk top application in Excel or the like. TTMS BASIC licensees will get it as a free add in module. Both Julian and I are keen to make it as accessible as possible just like THREATS is as paper system. I will keep you posted. I have a number of other research and development projects with Canadian Forsetry, USDA and Melbourne Uni that I will be posting on in the near future. We were asked by a number of you to make the TTMS system as relevent as possible to arboriculture and more accessible. So that is waht we are doing. We already have the new entry level system which will cover the needs of the occasional user at a fraction of the cost of contemporary systems. My next aim is to maximise the potential of the flexibility of the system and realise its full potential.

If you woud like a demo contact me directly. Details of how it works are in the pdf Regards Marcus B-T TTMS BST.pdf

We have a new entry level product to the TTMS range. It only works on the base and stem of the tree upto a height of 6 meters, and you can only do around 7 trees a day. But it is still a 3D assessment and only costs £1950 ex VAT. It includes the infrared detection machine (not a camera), three day training course and 6 month software license. For full details e-mail [email protected]

To clarify why our technique is not strictly speaking thermography. We only use the thermal imaging camera on trees and so only set up the camera for that use, whereas a thermogtapher has the skill and knowledge to look at many applications based on an understanding of the thermal properties of many substances (that doesn't mean to say I couldn't if I wanted to, I have a degree in chemistry from the University of Leeds and studied thermodynamics for two years). Secondly we extract the temperature from the radiometric images and analyse it statistically, which you can do as a thermographer but it is not the normal way, most of the techniques look at absolute changes and use delta T values and the like. These don't work so well though when you have biological data.

In terms of the 'spectrum' that is just down to the maths of how structures work. t/R is an approximation of the residual strength at the base of the tree based on the relationship between force applied and resisting forces. You can use the same approach at branch unions and at any point along the branch. In terms of what you do with different attributes, you pool them together according to what they relate to i.e. the part of the tree that is adapting/changing, that is until the stats tells you there is a significant difference (null hypothesis approach). E.g, at a branch union, an inclusion brings about a significant difference in the data from decay at unions, but there is also an interaction between the two.

If you would like to put down the questions here I will be only too happy to answer them. I don't deliberately avoid questions but I do get bombarded with them some so occasionally some pass me by.

Sorry Tony I didn't respond to the piece on consistency. It is quite straight forward realy. The attribute comes about in response to the a change or inconsistency in wood properties brought about by structural, environmental or biological pressure (or any combination of these). There are critcal dimensions that bring about the failures associated with the attributes. So by using a combination of defnining the dimensions through VTA and assessing the wood properties through TI, or other measure of wood properties, you get your information for a database. The consistency is ensured by the combination of the dimensions and the wood properties for each attribute. If you don't have that link then there is no consistency. What is also important is that if you have someone who cannot define the attribute then you may look at the wrong relationship. So proper training and understanding of VTA is essential.

To answer Tony's qusetion about threshold analysis, we use the accepted statistical figure of 95% of the population. So you separate out the 5% that is likely to be atypical of the population as a whole. But what you go through is a series of statistical tests till you find members of the population that fail them all and you are left with a small number of trees that require further investigation. This is exactly what people do with a VTA but they have to be (in part) subjective about it and so they don't get close to 95% and often make errors if they try to. A 95% confidence figure for separation of data is well within the recorded numbers of failures every year and so there is an experimental validation of the data. It may be that over time we go to a higher level of significance say 99% but it is too early to say at the moment. Failure data bases are important in terms of understanding structural weakness but unfortunately they are not quick enough to capture data to build up useful databases beyond this. You would have to wait around 80 years before you would have enough data if you only used failures. So a methodlogy that looks at both sides of the story, 'why trees fall down' and also 'why they stand up' is always going to be more robust. The question about the camera pallet is an interesting one because some people are colourblind. You can use any pallet you like once the images are calibrated so it's just down to preference. We extract the temperature data and analyse it so it doesn't matter in the end but it is a way of quickly discarding insignificant trees. Hope you liked the picture, it must be one of the highest 'value' trees I have seen.

Since I have had a rant here is some eye candy for all tree lovers Eye Candy.pdf

When a visual analysis of trees is carried out it identifies a number of attributes that the tree has and these often relate to Mattheck's ideas of how trees respond. The problem is that they are just that, attributes and it is hard to quantify them. What often happens is that based on the identification, work is carried out on the trees in response to the identification, because there is no way of separating out which ones are more likely to fail than others. This is the logical conclusion. However a proportion of the trees will not require work because the attribute is not sufficiently developed to cause a structural problem. Thermal imaging allows you to quantify the attributes identified through visual assessment, and find out at what point they become critical. Then work is recommeded when it is needed. In some cases work can be delayed (to wait and see what happens) in some cases it is unecessary. Some examples. Around 15% of K. duesta infections in Beech are purely saprophytic. Around 50% of M. giganteous infections are due to historical damage the tree has recovered from. Most Ganoderma sp. decay causes a retrenchment of the canopy such that work is unecessary apart from dead wood removal. Thermal imaging allows you to make sence of the VTA data you collect. You can detect decay with it but it almost becomes a so what? Because what it also does is identifies the boundaries to a trees structural capabilities, you cannot do this with resistograph or any othe technology because you can't get a big enough set of data to base the assumptions on. However, these other technologies do have a place and the TI tells you when and where to drill, tap or whatever. The industry may have its faults but why stick our heads in the sand. We already have most of the data that we need to make very good assumptions about trees, all we need is the methodology to make sence of it. All I can say is that about three years ago I went to a beech tree in Bedfordshire that was due for removal because it had M. giganteous and K. duesta at the base. I surveyed it and made some calculations based on the data sets we had, and recomended that if the height could be reduced by around 25% it should be stable since every other beech with that amount of dysfuction fell below that particular height classification. I consulted with J Forbes Laird as to the practicalities of such a reduction and he agreed that the tree could just about withstand the amount of removal if the tree required it. The tree is still hollow, the tree still has fungi, the tree is still there, the tree is healthy, and the client saved around £1500. Tree work becomes more focused, and fewer trees are removed. I disagree with the statement about the majority of people not liking trees but there is a problem with confidence of prediction. This tends to lead to a mitigative approach and work is carried out just in case. This is not a criticism since I have been in this situation myself. However a robust system that demonstartes that actually tree x is no different to 95% of the population is a compelling argument for not carrying out the work or not felling the tree. Every time a local authority tree survey is carried out, this data is collected and could be used to give us this information, but we are not making good use of this data. In every other biological field this approach is used, why not in arboriculture? Trees adapt to their enviroments and it is only the outliers that fail. Finding the outliers is relatively straight forward but you need a methodology. It still starts with VTA and always will but before work is recommeded there should be an evaluation of those attributes that are idntified. THREATS is very good at dealing with many of them but even JFL agrees that TI can introduce an excellent next step before work is considered. If it can save the client's money why wouldn't they go for it.

I am working with Julian to intergrate outputs from our TTMS software into THREATS so that they have relevance to the risk assessement and the management outcomes rather than just being interesting information; because both systems are based on population analysis, this is relatively straight forward. Also TTMS gives info on wood drying, cankers, some insect pests and root damage from construction. It can do this because the heat signitures (the respose times) of each of these are different; so the system has tremendous flexibility. TTMS BASIC software v2.pdf promo 02-09.pdf

It all depends on what your day to day is, and what the desired outcome is. At the moment I, and most of the licensees, use it as a second stage to VTA on larger trees around 60 cm DBH upwards. A great number of clients are those who want to preserve trees or reduce/spread the amount of tree work carried out and are looking at methodologies that meet this need without compromising on safety. The National Trust for Scotland are a good example in tht one of their foresters is trained in the technology and uses it regularly as part of thier assessment procedure. Of course we use it at Blenheim Palace and Ampthill Park as two examples of large sites that have benefited greatly from it. If you go to Blenheim now look at the contemporary work in contrast to some of the historical work. I know of around 200 regular clients that give work to us and our licensees as well as some more occasional users and this figure is growing. I have reversed decisions to fell on around 60 veteran trees, including fifteen ancient beech with merripilus or ustulina or both.