The arborist comes back from the field with measurements on her phone notes, photos scattered across three different apps, and site tags that say "Glorieta 1" without specifying which of the two rotary sites has the leaning Nogal flagged for intervention. Back at the office, the data needs to be manually entered into a spreadsheet, the photos manually sorted and renamed, and the site ambiguity resolved by memory or a follow-up call to whoever was in the field that day. This is an inventory that immediately starts decaying the moment it's created.
The Weight Distributed Across the Record
Urban timber species management produces a specific kind of mental load: you're not just tracking individual trees, you're tracking a dynamic system where each individual has a physical state, a management requirement, a spatial context, and a temporal baseline — all of which need to be correlatable against each other. Keeping that in your head across 200+ specimens across eight sites is not sustainable, and offloading it to a shared spreadsheet just moves the chaos into a format that's slightly easier to aggregate but equally difficult to update from the field.
The FLA template resolves this by putting the full decision context into a single mobile record. When you're standing at site FLA 2 looking at a Cedrela with fungal damage and a canopy extending over a service road, you log it all in one place: species, three CAP measurements, bole height, total height, canopy spread on both axes, physical condition, management requirement, and a photo with embedded GPS. That record is the complete field observation. Nothing needs to be transferred or transcribed.
The Three-CAP Measurement and What It Reveals
The template carries three separate CAP (Circunferencia a la Altura del Pecho) fields: CAP, CAP 2, and CAP 3. This is not redundancy — it's a protocol for multi-stemmed individuals and for cross-verification on large-girthed specimens where a single tape measurement is subject to positional error.
A multi-stemmed Samán or a buttressed Ceiba genuinely requires three perimeter measurements taken at slightly different heights or positions to produce a defensible basal area figure. The template enforces the data structure that good dendrometry actually requires, rather than collapsing it into a single number that erases the complexity of the measurement.
Altura Fustal (bole height) and Altura Total (total height) are stored separately for exactly the same reason — in timber management, these are not interchangeable. The commercializable column differs from the ecological crown, and conflating them produces useless data for either silvicultural or urban planning purposes.
Estado Físico and Requerimiento: The Intervention Pipeline
The Estado físico field has twelve states — Bueno, Pudrición tallo, Pudrición ramas, Hongos, Plagas, Virosis, Muerto en pie, Otro, Daño mecánico, Daño biológico, Podas mal realizadas, Inclinado. The Requerimiento field has ten management responses — Poda manejo, Poda formación, Plateo, Abono, Control plagas, Podas fitosanitarias, Manejo fitosanitario, and others.
Together, these two fields form the intervention pipeline. At the end of a census cycle covering all eight sites — both Glorrietas, FLA 1 and 2, Diagonal entrada, Calle 89, Glorieta 1A, Glorieta 1B — you filter by Requerimiento = Control plagas and Estado físico = Plagas and you have your priority phytosanitary intervention list, sorted by site. You hand that to the maintenance crew. No additional translation layer needed.
The AIEV field — Adecuación del Individuo al Espacio Verde, classified as Óptimo, Adecuada, or Inadecuada — is the urban planning overlay on top of the dendrometric data. A tree can be in perfect phytosanitary condition (Estado físico = Bueno) and still be classified as AIEV Inadecuada because its canopy is conflicting with power lines or its root system is lifting pavement. These two dimensions are independent assessments, and the template keeps them structurally separate rather than collapsing them into a single condition rating.
When the Database Covers All Eight Sites
At scale — all eight sites fully inventoried with repeat surveys scheduled — the temporal dimension becomes the most valuable output. Comparing CAP measurements across survey dates gives you actual growth rates per individual. Comparing Estado físico classifications over time gives you deterioration curves: which specimens moved from Bueno to Inclinado to Muerto en pie, over what timespan, and at which sites. That's the data that justifies budget requests for preventive maintenance rather than emergency removal.
The GPS coordinate field, paired with the timestamped Fecha field, means every record carries its own audit trail. The photo taken at Glorieta 1B on the survey date, with the measurement data attached to the same record, is the closest thing to an objective field observation you can produce without a full botanical assessment team.