daltontrees

My guess would be multiple breaches of HSWA, including LOLER, PUWER and WAH. Basically not using industry best practices, and ignoring wealth of industry advice against discredited practices, But the lawyer in me wants to qualify that by saying that if you used natural fork as a one-off when no alternative was available you'd be OK but if you repeatedly used it you wouldn't be. And if your rope broke because you had knackered it beforehand and had't checked it was fit for purpose, you'd be busted.

Why? No point in asking unless you either want to be told what you thought anyway or want to know the right answer. Dropping and lowering on krabs and shackles will wreck or break a rope. You won't be insured and somene might get badly hurt. Buy a pulley. MIne cost £80, I have used it probably over 8,000 times, that's a penny a go. And it's still shiny, will outlive me for sure and will never ruin a £120 lowering rope. Saving me a fortune, it is.

I agree totally, I wouldn't use rope and krab if a sling was available. Which it always is except for emergencies. Big big bites get a timber hitch and an isolating half hitch.

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

Thanks, as you are someone whose opinion I have come to respect on Arbtalk, I attach weight to your comments on this suibject. And immediately on looking at your company's website I see that you are CAS accredited in PTI. Maybe there's the answer to my dilemma. If it is possible to be a CAS member and to do tree risk assessment under the PTI competence I don't need to concern myself with TRAQ. I have already satisfied myself professionally that TRAQ is a bit like trying to wire a plug while wearing gloves and sunglasses.

This is making less and less sense. CAS says that QTRA is deficient by having no minimum entry requirement. It says TRAQ is better in part by having a level 2 qualification requirement. But membership of CAS requires level 4. Anyone getting into CAS and having QTRA surely meets and exceeds the requirements of CAS and TRAQ by some considerable extent?

Thanks, and just when I thought I was getting my head around this and about to jon the CAS.... So (and by all means say you don't know and direct me instead to the CAS), does this mean that I could not get a CAS competency in tree risk assessment if I don't pass the TRAQ training and exam (including having the implied minimum entry requirements)? Even if I have the PTI qualification? Even if I have my own tried and tested tree risk assessment system? Will QTRA competent CAS members have to re-train to use TRAQ? Will the QTRA competency in fact disappear, replaced with a TRAQ competency? I'm not getting this so far, am I? On the CAS website it is clear that the BS5837 competence is by peer review. This seems logical. So why can't tree risk assessment be by peer review, or even better by one of a number of routes (QTRA + Level 2, TRAQ (which includes level 2) or peer review)?

I am keen to write such a paper, but like most folk I have a living to earn which gets in the way of such niceties as pure research without financial reward. That's a tough assignment you have. It took ISA two years and a cast of thousands to come up with TRAQ, and it was basically a re-hash of what it already had. Can I ask, what level of qualification is this assignment for?

Likewise. I seem to have persuaded the family that Preston is lovely at that time of year. Now i need to think of some cracking questions for David Lonsdale.

Nifty knot! After a couple of minutes' practice I can now tie it in 5 seconds with my eyes shut. It aint no bowline though, try using it to tie a line to the bow of a boat, it can't be done. Circus midline yes, circus bowline no. Like the bowline is,weaker than say a figure of 8 on the bight, the circus 'midline' is weaker than the similar alpine butterfly. And it's not 3 directional like the butterfly. Definitely easier to open, though. The ugly bastard child of the bowline and the butterfly.

I see that the 11th June session is north of Preston, a definite bonus. I'll see if I can double it up with a visit to family in Lancaster. And I need to get over my anti-American bias and loathing of the term 'Arborist', and join the CAS. I don't know if I mentioned it here on Artalk before, but I had plans to research and publish a paper on risk perception and comparisons of qualitative and quantitative methods. Then I ended up surveying in Wales all winter, the commuting (time) nearly finished me off and I put it the adminintensive proposal on hold. I'd be happy to revive it if someone wants to pitch in. I am partly put off by the prevalent (but tankfully not unanimous) attitude that doing tree risk asssessment better and more easily than it already is doesn't matter. Co-write credit of course if it gets to the Journal (which it should), always nice to get research peer reviewed and published. QTRA or TRAQ devotees need not apply...

I just tried this outside. Maximum load I could hold with right hand while tying with left hand was about 5kg. So it's OK for tying the knot in a rope that's hanging below you but tht's about it. And better than the hand-wrapping version. For fully loaded rope I'd still use a prussik loop to establish a midline attachment point.

I think the preview has all the useful bits, probably not worth paying for the full article.

That's got to be a backward step. Much as I disagreed with the QTRA trainer's presentation of his critique of TRAQ, I certainly agreed with the overall conclusion - it's dangerously imprecise. Kew used (possibly still uses) the original Matheny & Clark system, a number-based additive system that was the progenitor of QTRA. It's probably a matter of semantics, but the word 'subjective' seems to be shifting from its true meaning, which is the opposite of 'objective'. Commonly now it is becoming synonymous with 'imprecise'. Tree hazard evaluation should be objective, even if it is impossible to achieve precision due to hidden aspects. It shuld leave no room for what the surveyor thinks a word means. As such TRAQ seems t me a masterpiece of imprecision and subjectivity. Co-incidentally, I have the details for signing up to CAS on the desk this week, after a bit of dithering I am thinking of going ahead with it. Somehting lke this would certainly cause me to re-consider. I wouldn't want my professional competence to be pre-judged by potential clients by my being hitched to TRAQ through CAS. Just a preliminary view for now, I'll look into it a bit more first.

Tree Ontogeny and Its Reflection in the Structure and Dynamics of Plant and Soil Covers - Springer

Trees: Their Natural History deals with this in a few paragraphs at pages 207 and 208. Not a lot of detail. If you haven't got acces to the book let me know and I will scan the relevant bit for you. Strictly for study, I don't want to get into copyright issues.

The tricky bit of this knot is missing from the pictures. Between picture 4 and 5. Put your right thumb under all the loops, so that it is tight to your right palm. Pass the bit being held in your left fingers to your right thumb and 3rd and 4th fingers, pinch it and pull out your right hand from the loops, taking the 'eye' with it.

Slick, but not new. Te key is to start with the left hand thumb down, palm away, and the right thumb up palm away. What I like is that 0.11 it is possible to let go completely with right hand, relying on left hadn grip to hold a loop. I would then tend to toss the loop over the back of the left hand and pick it up behind with the right hand. Then twisting the right to the palm-up position presents the opening for the loop to be passed through. Could be really useful for a vertical rope under load, thanks.

It is am immensely complicated business. Time and time again I have tried to simplify in my own mind the processes and stages. There are loads of books dealing with physiology, loads with morphology and plenty of info available about the outward appearance of growth responses, but I have never come across a single discourse covering what you are looking for. I only really get 3 stages, germination, pre-maturity and post-maturity. Apart from that ther don't seem to be any other stages when growth and form are affected by the appearance or disappearance of specialist cell development. Everything else is a combination of size increase by annual increment, various tropisms, adaptive growth, defense, mutations, wounding, soil, climate, exposure, reaction to self-weight etc. Physiology books seem too general, concentrating on evidence from experiments on simpler and mostly non-woody plants. Tree books don't seem to come far enough towards the subject from the other direction. There is a fair amout of stuff around about 'morphogenesis' but it concentrates on changes within a growing season rahter than over the life of perennials. If you can get a copy of 'The Physiology of Flowering Plants' 3rd ed., p.153 et seq and chapters 11 and 12 might help, but the book is written for biologists who speak the language a bit. You might be disappointed if all it does is confirm that branch primordia are initiated by hormonal or other substance control, though, if you are looking for specific chemical names.

Another one for Black Walnut (Juglans nigra), too many leaflets for Juglans regia. Watch out for Juglans ailanthifolia, as the name suggests it's apt to be confused with Ailanthus.

I don't think 2 is Juniper. It is the characteristic juvenile foliage of Lawsons', and 'Elwoodii' characeristically keeps juvenile foliage like this all over for all of its life.

I saw it on a norway maple about 25cm across, couldn't believe it and have never seen it since then on any tree anywhere near so small. My suspicions about K. deusta is that in its anaerobic decay mode it cannot overcome the parenchymal defenses of sapwood, but maybe can beaver away in dead heartwood. If so I would agree withe the general observation that it needs older wood.

Thanks. I usually store my saws on their side when full ,but that says more about my leaky filler caps than any understanding I have of evaporation. I'm going to switch to Aspen anyway next time I am near a stockist. So what is a carb kit? Is it something that you can buy off the shelf? I'd give it a shot because I am very underwhelmed by all my local saw repair guys. I have enough wheezing pensioner saws that I coud send you a busload for fixing if you weren't so far away.

Lovely clear pictures, thanks.

No-one else replying? That's not a very nice welcome to Arbtalk for you. There's no evidence I have ever seen that K. deusta is actively pathogenic. There are some suggestions of it, but never backed up by hard evidence. Personally I suspect it as a theoretical possibility but realistically highly unlikely. Much much more likely that it invades through dead tap roots in at least semi-mature trees. So the chances of remnants of it (spores or mycelia) from a removed infected tree infecting a young vigorous replacement lime are negligibly small. Or put it this way, if you were planning to appeal against lime as the replacement as a condition of a TPO consent, I don't see you getting very far. I hope that helps a little.