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26 September 2016 Landscape and Irrigation www.landscapeirrigation.com ■ BY BRANDON M. GALLAGHER WATSON It wasn't that long ago that a chain saw was all you needed to be in the tree care business. Okay, you probably needed a truck, too; but, in general, tree care was a pretty low-tech industry. The past decade has seen new developments in the equipment for preforming pruning and removal services, as well as the computerized world that surrounds everything we do these days. The following are fi ve different types of technology that are changing the way arboriculture is practiced today. 1. GIS/mapping Data is king, as they say, and the data of tree care is getting better all the time. Much of that is related to advancements in geographic information systems (GIS). GIS is the general term for data that is tied to digitized spatial information — a map that can tell you many things about the content it contains. Many people collapse GIS with GPS — the Global Positioning System satellite network that can fi nd your exact location in a matter of seconds. In the world of GIS, GPS provides an important data point of knowing where something, such as a tree, is located; when combined with other data points such as species, size class, health condition, etc., GIS becomes an invaluable tool for arborists. Tree care companies are using GIS data to gain insights on everything from tracking long-term changes in urban forest health to gathering information on their customers' buying habits. For example, GIS can let us know how many trees are in a certain sales territory, or how many of those trees are susceptible to a certain health issue, or what percent of those tree's owners are opting for a service on them. This allows us to do sales forecasting, and also gives us information on what services should be marketed to a certain geographic region. If we are interested in sending out a postcard to treat for, say, Japanese beetles, we can use GIS to pull out all the customers we have with lindens or birch trees, and then overlay data such as median income or median property value to determine where our marketing dollars are best spent. Tree inventories have become commonplace for just about TREE CARE 5 Technologies That Are Changing Tree Care Advances in tree healthcare application technology are making treatments faster, easier, and safer for applicators.