Tree Survey Equipment:
What You Need

A DBH tape (sometimes called a diameter tape) wraps around the stem at breast height and reads diameter directly, because the tape's markings are pre-calculated for circumference-to-diameter conversion. It's the single most-used tool on a survey, and the cheapest one worth owning outright rather than borrowing.

You can measure with a regular tape and divide the circumference by pi (roughly 3.14) if you don't have one — slower, and you'll be doing that division fifty times on a busy site, but it works in a pinch.

For multi-stem trees, measure each stem separately at breast height and record them individually — don't average them into one number, since the individual stem diameters matter for both condition assessment and any category or RPA calculation downstream.

A laser rangefinder or a dedicated hypsometer (a rangefinder with built-in trigonometry to calculate height from angle and distance) gives you a precise height reading in seconds. For most inventory and BS5837 work, though, a reasonably practiced visual estimate is standard and accepted — height is rarely the field that decides a category or condition rating.

Where precise height earns its cost: crane or rigging planning ahead of removal work, clearance calculations near buildings or overhead lines, or a client/authority that specifically requests measured rather than estimated figures. If you're doing that kind of work regularly, the tool pays for itself quickly; if you're doing general inventory work, it's an unnecessary line item.

Crown spread (north-south and east-west, at minimum) can be measured by pacing out from the stem to the drip line in each direction, or with a laser rangefinder for speed and precision on larger canopies. Either method is standard practice — pacing is free and fast enough for most jobs; a laser matters more on large or irregular canopies where pacing accuracy drops off.

Some jobs ask for all four cardinal directions rather than just north-south and east-west, particularly where canopy area feeds an appraisal or where the crown is visibly asymmetric. Decide the requirement before the site visit — going back for a fourth direction on fifty trees costs a lot more than measuring it once while you're already standing there.

Any modern phone handles photos and data entry fine. A tablet gives you a bigger screen for reviewing the site plan and reading small annotations, which matters more on dense multi-page plans than on a simple residential lot. Neither needs to be rugged or specialised — a basic protective case and a habit of not setting it down on wet ground covers most field risk.

What matters more than the device itself: whatever app or method you use on it needs to work with the screen wet, with gloves on if it's cold, and without a cell signal — because you won't always have one.

Battery life across a full field day is a real constraint, not a minor annoyance. Screen brightness at max in direct sun, the phone's own GPS radio (if any app on it is polling location), and cold weather all drain a battery faster than normal indoor use. Carrying a charged portable battery pack is cheap insurance against losing your data-entry device halfway through a large site.

Past the core kit, a few extras earn their place depending on the job:

You need some form of the site plan on you — a survey drawing, landscape plan, or property plat — as the base you'll number trees against. A printed copy on a clipboard has been the default for decades and still works. The downside is the extra step afterward: scanning or photographing the marked-up printout, then re-drawing or re-marking it digitally for the final report.

Loading the same PDF onto a phone or tablet and marking it up directly removes that extra step, at the cost of needing a device that stays usable in bright sunlight and wet weather.

The equipment list above is short on purpose — but every item on it has to survive mud, rain on the screen, gloves, and a device battery that's been running all day. A DBH tape that's rusted shut, a phone with a screen that won't register a gloved-finger tap, or notes written in rain-smeared pencil are the actual failure modes on most jobs, not a missing piece of equipment.

Rinse and dry a fabric DBH tape after a wet job before it goes back in the bag — a tape that stays damp inside its housing rusts at the reading marks first, which is exactly where it matters most. Wipe down a laser rangefinder's lens before use on a misty morning; a fogged lens reads distance wrong without any obvious sign that it's doing so.

Software doesn't replace any of the equipment above — it replaces the paper notebook, the clipboard, and the after-the-fact spreadsheet transcription. The measuring tools still do the measuring; the app just gets the resulting numbers onto the record once, at the tree, instead of onto paper first and a spreadsheet second.

The evaluation criteria for survey software are the same as for any other piece of field kit: does it work in the conditions you actually work in. An app that needs a cell signal to save a record fails the exact test a rusted tape or a dead laser would fail — it works in the office, not on the job.

LogLog runs on the phone or tablet you're already carrying — no dedicated hardware, no separate GPS unit. Load your PDF site plan, drop a numbered pin at each tree, and type the DBH, height, and crown spread readings straight from your tape and rangefinder into the record while you're standing there. It works fully offline, so a dead cell signal on a wooded site doesn't stop the survey.

It's software, not a measuring instrument — LogLog doesn't estimate height or DBH for you, and there's no GPS auto-plotting; pins go where you tap them on the plan, same as marking a printed copy by hand.