Urban forest inspection doesn't wait for a clean desk. A call comes in — a large Urapán on Calle 72 is leaning over a school roof after overnight rain — and within forty minutes a silviculture technician has to be on site, assess the situation, document everything to legal standard, and decide whether to authorize emergency intervention before anyone gets hurt. The "Acta de visita SDA" template exists for exactly that moment.
The Price of Incomplete Field Records
The SDA's SIGAU system is unforgiving about documentation gaps. An inspection that isn't tied to a proper Número de Acta, stamped with precise coordinates, and linked to a SIRE event number can be challenged — by the property owner, by a contractor looking to avoid a compensation obligation, or by an internal audit that finds the intervention sequence doesn't match the timeline in the record.
The most common failure point isn't dishonesty. It's that technicians arrive at a site with a wet notebook, or trying to capture coordinates from memory on the way back to the office, or realizing they forgot to note whether the NIT on the authorization matches the one in the pending intervention file. By the time the formal acta gets written up, details are soft and the SIGAU code has to be verified against field notes that may or may not reflect what was actually seen.
A technician who works a full inspection cycle in Bogotá — covering multiple localidades in a single day, each with its own UPZ, each generating its own acta — can have four or five incomplete records waiting for office reconstruction by end of shift. That debt accumulates fast.
What Gets Captured on the Ground
The template's structure maps directly to SDA field procedure. The moment you're on site, you're logging Número de visita, Número de Acta (VA-format), and clicking GPS coordinates into both Dirección and Coordenadas planas. Two coordinate fields may seem redundant, but they aren't — one captures the postal address for administrative referencing, the other captures MAGNA-SIRGAS plane coordinates required for SIGAU spatial registration. Getting these mixed up costs you a return trip.
Hora de inicio and Hora de terminación matter more than most technicians give them credit for. Emergency authorizations issued outside regulation hours carry different procedural weight, and if a neighbor or legal representative later contests the intervention timing, your timestamp is your defense.
The Situación encontrada field is free text and long-form — the place where you note plaga de escamas or phytopathological visible stress, primary lean direction and degree, evidence of prior unauthorized pruning, root lift status. This is the narrative that differentiates a documented professional assessment from a checkbox inspection.
Código SIGAU links the physical tree to the arboreal registry. Without it, the rest of the record is legally freestanding but institutionally unanchored.
When the Record Has to Support an Emergency Decision
The Autoriza emergencia field is a binary Si/No — but it's the field that triggers the entire downstream legal and operational chain. Toggling it to Si means the intervention can proceed without the standard permitting timeline. It also triggers NIT autorizado (the contractor or entity permitted to execute) and Compensación por plantación — whether the responsible party is bound to replant at the SDA-mandated ratio.
At a hundred records logged across a season, the value shifts. You can filter all actas where emergency was authorized and compensation wasn't confirmed. You can cross-reference NIT numbers against authorized contractor lists. You can pull every acta in a given UPZ where Número de árboles en riesgo exceeded three, and build a risk map without any additional reporting step.
The Evento SIRE field ties each acta back to the emergency incident management system. When a SIRE event triggers multiple inspection visits — follow-up after an initial assessment, or a second opinion on a contested tree — the actas stack under the same event reference, giving you a complete intervention history in sequence.