Glossary — Risk & Assessment
Tree Condition
Rating
A condition rating scores a tree's overall health and structural soundness on a fixed scale — most commonly good, fair, poor, or dead — so every tree in a survey can be compared and prioritized the same way, without relying on a paragraph of prose per tree.
What each rating actually looks at
Good — full, dense crown for the species and age; no significant deadwood, decay, or structural defects; normal vigor (leaf color, shoot extension, bud set all typical).
Fair — some crown dieback or minor deadwood, possibly a correctable structural issue (included bark, minor lean), reduced but acceptable vigor. Usually retainable with monitoring or minor treatment.
Poor — significant deadwood or crown thinning, visible decay indicators (cavities, fungal fruiting bodies, cracks), declining vigor, or a structural defect that's hard to mitigate. Often a candidate for removal or a closer risk assessment.
Dead — no living tissue. Retained only where standing deadwood has habitat value and poses no target risk; otherwise scheduled for removal.
Why a 6-value scale beats a 4-value one
A lot of real trees sit between two categories — better than fair but not quite good, or clearly declining but not yet poor. Forcing every tree into one of four buckets loses that nuance and tends to produce a lot of borderline calls that two surveyors would score differently. A 6-value scale that adds "good-fair" and "fair-poor" as transitional grades keeps the underlying four-point logic intact for reporting purposes (the transitional grades roll up to their nearest base value in summaries) while giving the field surveyor a more honest option than rounding up or down on a tree that's genuinely in between.
Condition rating vs. risk rating
These two get conflated but answer different questions. Condition rating asks how healthy and structurally sound the tree is, in general. Risk rating asks how likely a specific defect is to fail and what would happen if it did, given what's underneath the tree. A tree in poor condition over an empty field can carry a low risk rating — nothing to hit if it fails. A tree in good condition with one bad structural defect over a busy path can carry a high risk rating despite an otherwise good score. Recording both, separately, avoids collapsing two different professional judgments into one number.
Related terms
Recording condition alongside everything else
See the tree inventory guide for where condition fits in a full survey, or LogLog's condition field — a 6-value scale (good, good-fair, fair, fair-poor, poor, dead) attached to every tree pin, with the two transitional grades rolling up to their base color in the app's summary views.
Score condition at the tree, while you're looking at it. LogLog exports the rating with every other field, no re-transcribing from a notebook later.
Get early access Open the app