Rigging Setup: What’s in Your Pre-Flight Site Plan?
This excerpt is a preview of TCIA’s soon-to-be-released, revised “Best Practices for Rigging in Arboriculture” manual. No two rigging jobs are exactly the same. Pre-planning of each rigging job is required, and constant re-evaluation on site must take place as the job progresses. Prevent your rigging operation from becoming an incident scene by pre-planning every […]
Aerial Friction in Top-Down Rigging Scenarios
Arborist technical rigging is often as simple as a rope, a branch union and a few trunk wraps, or it can grow to complex systems with multiple lines converging from multiple points to lower large and small tree parts. Of all the tools and techniques we apply, rigging setup and load management are often the […]
Competency in Arboriculture
Competence is defined as the set of demonstrable characteristics and skills that enable and improve the efficiency of performance within a job. The word “competence” as it is used today first appeared in 1959 in an article authored by R.W. White, who employed the word as a concept for performance motivation. For our purposes, the […]
Use Your Head(ing) Cut to Delay Decay
One of the most common shortcomings of urban tree management worldwide is the failure to remove select branches in a timely manner throughout the lifetime of a tree. This has many important impacts on management and safety, including: • contributing to poor structure (such as codominant stems or multiple attachments (Photo 1); • being a […]
Spotted Lanternfly Updates – Feeding, Hosts, Damage and Controls
By now, most arborists have heard of spotted lanternfly (SLF), yet another pest from Asia recently arrived to our country that is creating economic and environmental problems in the eastern United States. First detected in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 2014, SLF is not a fl y at all. Spotted lanternfly belongs to a group of […]