BS5837 tree survey software

A BS5837 survey carries a dozen or more fields per tree, all of which must stay internally consistent and spatially accurate enough to plot against a topographic survey. Paper forms and a spreadsheet mean every value is written once and typed again — and a transposed stem diameter moves a root protection area by metres.

The rework is rarely the survey itself. It is the reconciliation: chasing missing photographs, matching tree references between the schedule and the drawing, and re-issuing an appendix because a category changed after a site walkover.

• Mapped assets with stable references that survive across visits, revisions and contractors.
• Structured field capture — species, height, stem diameter, crown spread, age class, condition, remaining contribution and category, entered as fields rather than free text.
• Root protection areas derived from the captured stem diameter, so the schedule and the drawing cannot disagree.
• Photographs attached to the specific inspection, not loosely to the tree.
• Offline capture that syncs when signal returns, for screened or rural sites.
• CSV, Excel and GIS exports so the constraints plan is produced from the survey rather than retyped from it.

Survey templates are configurable, so a practice can run its own BS5837 field set alongside tree safety inspections and ash dieback work in the same project.

Arbrium was built on network-scale infrastructure programmes — thousands of trees, multiple surveyors, a client expecting mid-programme visibility. That same machinery makes a 400-tree development site straightforward: assign the site, track progress per surveyor, and export the whole schedule in one pass.

See the National Highways case study for how that works at scale.

If you want the categories, root protection area maths and document sequence explained before looking at tooling, read our BS5837:2012 tree survey guide. For lender-facing work, see mortgage tree reports.