The ubiquitous smart phone is taking over the world!
Apart from high levels of street cred, a smart phone does have some useful purposes, particularly for trades people looking for very specific and often hard-to-find information.
Knot-based tools where the first smart phone applications to make an appearance in arboriculture but there are plenty more in the pipeline including tree identification, fungi ID and the location and numbering of trees using the smart phones built-in GPS.
But there is one smart phone app developers should seriously consider for arborists and that is a log weight calculator.
Have a look at the Canadian-based Burley Boys Log Weight Calculator below. This is a perfect web example of how such a smart phone application could work.
You simply select the tree species from the drop-down menu, bang in the bottom and top diameter and length of the piece you are taking off, press Calculate Log Weight and bob's your uncle.
The trees are mostly American species in the Burley Boys example and the measurements are imperial but the weight is conveniently displayed in both kilograms and pounds.
A metric version, with New Zealand tree species, would be a very useful tool indeed (here's an opportunity for kiwi smart phone developers… and you'd make a fortune on iTunes).
Our thanks to Andy Harrison of Harrison Rockets for this lead.
