Observatree FAQs

Within England, Scotland or Wales, please report any unhealthy trees with a potential pest or disease to Tree Alert. This is Forest Research’s platform for all tree pest and disease reports. The report requires photographs of the tree before it can be submitted.

The team at Tree Alert will respond to your query if there is concern and may ask for samples.

In Northern Ireland, please report via TreeCheck.

Observatree is a pest and disease reporting project and cannot provide tree management advice. For tree management advice please contact an arborist, you can find accredited professionals on the Arboricultural Association website here.

It’s great that you’d like to volunteer! Being an Observatree volunteer involves conducting a minimum of 12 tree health surveys a year. We provide pest and disease identification training but ask that volunteers can identify common tree species at the time of application.

We only recruit volunteers on an annual basis, typically in the new year. This allows us to provide the training and resources that allow you to learn about pests and diseases with other new volunteers. We may only recruit from certain regions each year, this allows us to maintain good network coverage. You can sign up for our E-Newletter to hear when recruitment opens.

Please see our pest and disease pages to learn about our priority pests and diseases. These have been selected by governmental scientists as posing a significant threat to trees and woods in the UK and have discernible symptoms to check in the field.

We are passionate about sharing the messages around tree health and we would love to help. But our ability to do so is limited. We receive lots of request for providing talks to local groups, charities and professional bodies. Some of our project staff are tree health professionals and can provide some pest and disease training to larger groups. But working for Observatree is often a small part of their job and they may have limited availability. Virtual meetings help to reduce time and the need for travel, but some training (such as tree identification) is best done face-to-face. Depending upon requirements, we may need to charge for time or expenses.

A few of our more experienced volunteers have given talks to small local groups about Observatree and their role as a volunteer. This may meet your requirement but will again depend upon volunteer availability. Please note that our volunteers do not provide any formal training.

We encourage everyone to look at the free resources that we have available online. These include videos that could be watched at groups meetings. If you wish to enquire about receiving a talk or more formal training please email observatree@woodlandtrust.org.uk and provide as much information as possible about the type of event, requirement, audience, location, dates and options for delivery via a virtual meeting. We will then assess whether we are able to help.

We do not currently have the necessary systems in place to allow us to easily share data. As we move forwards with the project, we aim to improve our data handling systems with the intention of making tree health data available under license. When we are in a position to do so, we will update this answer and provide further instruction.