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Arborist / Tree Surgeon
Cares for individual trees — pruning, diagnosing disease, and safely removing hazardous trees.
Did you know?
The General Sherman giant sequoia, with about 1,487 cubic metres of trunk, is the largest known living single-stem tree on Earth.
How subjects help
- Biology: Spot fungus, rot or pests inside a tree before it becomes weak and dangerous.
- Physics: Judge which way a heavy branch will swing and fall before making the cut.
- Environmental Science: Decide whether an old tree can be saved because it shelters bats, birds and insects.
- Engineering: Rig ropes and pulleys to lower big limbs safely down from high in a tree.
A famous name
Alex Shigo: Tree scientist whose studies of tree decay changed how arborists prune and care for trees.
Try it yourself: Read a tree's life story
- If you have a stump or photo, find the middle. Each pair of one light and one dark ring is one year of growth. Count from the middle to the bark to find the tree's age.
- Now use the ring card: find the widest and narrowest rings. Wide rings mean a good growing year; narrow ones mean a hard year, often a dry one.
- Which two years look like droughts? Which years were best?
- Write a short diary for the made-up tree: which years were good, which were hard, and what might have happened.
Dendrochronologists measure ring widths under a microscope and match patterns between many trees to date old wood and rebuild rainfall and climate records going back centuries.
Adapted from US National Park Service: It Was a Very Good Year (lesson plan).
Also try: Do a garden bird count.
Known for it in
USA, UK, Australia, Germany, Canada