CPS Planning

Our arboriculture team works in the same practice as our town planners and landscape architects. That is the point of CPS Planning: the tree report, the landscape design and the planning submission they all feed into are produced under one roof, by people already across the project.

Around seventeen of us work across those three disciplines, led by directors Daniel Govers and Ben Tesoriero, who each bring more than twenty years to the practice, Daniel in the delivery of housing projects and Ben as a town planner in NSW. All of our consulting arborists hold AQF Level 5 qualifications, the Diploma of Arboriculture, with multiple years of experience behind them. Senior staff are registered with peak bodies including Arboriculture Australia and the Institute of Australian Consulting Arboriculturists, and are trained in Tree Risk Assessment Qualification, Quantified Tree Risk Assessment and VALID methodologies.

Preliminary tree reports are carried out early in design development to identify tree constraints, while there is still room to shift a footprint and save a tree worth keeping. Once the design has settled, the Arboricultural Impact Assessment evaluates the effect of the development or construction on the existing trees, and our tree protection specifications set out how the retained trees are to be looked after while the work goes on.

Tree risk assessments examine tree health and structure and report on the risk of failure and of harm. For larger holdings, schools, parks and hospitals among them, tree surveys gather data across the whole site rather than one tree at a time, and street tree masterplans guide the long term planning and care of a street tree population. We have also acted as expert witness in Land and Environment Court matters.

Where a proposal sits close to trees, root mapping establishes what is actually underground, using methods including excavation and ground penetrating radar, so the design can work off measurements. On site we provide supervision and certification: installing the protection measures and certifying that the conditions relating to tree preservation have been met.

We work from Surry Hills and Frenchs Forest, across Sydney and the rest of NSW. If you have a site with trees on it and a proposal you are trying to get through, get in touch and we will tell you which reports it needs and how they sit with the rest of the application.