ISA offers a variety of educational materials and products to help arborists expand their professional knowledge and experience. Every month we will feature a product or group of products. In April, ISA is featuring the recently released third edition of the Best Management Practices (BMP): Managing Trees During Site Development and Construction by Nelda Matheny, E. Thomas Smiley, Ryan Gilpin, and Richard Hauer.

The third edition of the BMP: Managing Trees During Site Development and Construction outlines considerations and practices to help arborists best protect trees so that they can thrive during and after construction.

“Site development typically occurs in six phases: planning, design, preconstruction, construction, landscaping, and post construction,” said Gilpin, an ISA Certified Arborist®. “When trees are considered in all phases of a construction project and managed as outlined in this publication, most trees designated for preservation will survive and flourish.”

The new edition of the BMP received significant updates, including revised and new content pertaining to each of the development phases.

More and more communities are looking for ways to preserve trees on construction sites and arborists are increasingly participating on design teams, according to Gilpin. In the new edition of the BMP, “the design phase received a lot of attention and was significantly updated to include plan review and tree impact assessment,” he said. “We find that the skills involved in reviewing construction plans are not possessed by typical arborists but are skills that many arborists have learned through training and practice.”

This publication is not only a great resource for anyone who works with construction or design teams but also for arborists across the field.

“There are many opportunities for different types of arborists in different areas to use practices recommended in this publication,” Gilpin said. “In particular, cities (or other permitting agencies) will benefit from [outlined practices in this BMP] that are applicable to their communities in writing policy and communicating to development teams what information is needed about trees to approve projects.”

Gilpin said that what truly makes this BMP stand out is that it introduces arborists to a different field with which many are not familiar.

”Because arborists are consistently being asked to bring arboriculture principles into a separate field, this document has a huge task of introducing arborists to a totally different field and showing them opportunities to be effective team members,” he said. “We don’t think that any of the other BMPs are about non-arboriculture fields in quite the same way.”

The new edition is now available for purchase in print in the ISA web store. A CEU quiz corresponding to this BMP is also available.

Purchase your copy today!