ISA offers a variety of educational materials to help arborists improve their arboricultural knowledge. Each week we will feature a product, or group of products that will enhance your arboriculture education. This week, ISA is featuring Up by Roots by James Urban.

Intended for public officials, design professionals, engineers, developers, and arborists who wish to increase the quality and value of the urban forest, Up By Roots covers the necessary knowledge and tools required for planting and maintaining city trees.

Urban said he wrote the guide because he felt there was a gap in the transfer of knowledge and best practices between arborist and landscape architects. Arborists tended to focus on the long term management of trees after planting, while landscape architects would focus more on getting the tree planted and through the end of the warrantee period.

“Each profession had different goals and neither understood very well the needs of the other,” he said. “Up By Roots was an attempt to solve as many of the problems created by these situations as possible. I saw myself as one of the few people who worked in both areas and who had spent several decades trying to find mutually acceptable answers to old questions.”

This highly relevant manual discusses guidance in policy decision-making, and studies the basic science of soil, trees, and soil condition analysis.

“The book lays out the science and technology of trees, written in a voice and language of nonacademic design practitioners,” Urban said. “The book tries to be easily digestible to practitioners who have little or no training in the science of trees and soils but still have to make judgements on how to proceed when planning for trees in the urban environment. The book also gives arborists a window into the approaches and language of the design practitioner so they can understand each other and the arborist can say to the landscape architect, ‘Here is a landscape architect who understands your profession and what he says is best practice.’”

Although the book was written with arborists and landscape architects in mind, Urban said the book can be useful for anyone involved in the process of adding trees to an urban environment such as the client, government reviewers, planners, tree nurseries, contractors and landscape managers.

“There is a critical relationship between the success of trees and the soils in which they are planted,” Urban said. “Further there are many other places along the path from concept to tree maturity that the participants need to understand in order to deliver future generations a long lived healthy mature tree.”

Purchase your copy today and start learning!