C&R Ryder Consulting

Evidence from this office has gone in front of VCAT, the Magistrates Court, the Coroners Court and planning panels. Investigative and forensic arboriculture and expert witness work is the specialty at C&R Ryder Consulting, whether the question is suspected building damage from tree roots or a tree failure that has caused damage or injury, and we will take an assessment as far as sampling where the case calls for it.

Cameron Ryder has been in arboriculture since 2002. He came through the University of Melbourne at Burnley College with an Advanced Diploma in Horticulture (Arboriculture) and a Bachelor of Horticulture with First Class Honours, worked as a climbing arborist until an injury ended that early, and has been consulting since 2004. He has assessed many hundreds of thousands of trees for local, state and federal government, developers, lawyers and architects, and he started this practice in 2014. He sits on the Institutional and Management Committee of Treenet, and he is a Registered Consulting Arborist with Arboriculture Australia, a member of the International Society of Arboriculture and a member of the Victorian Tree Industry Organisation.

Raelene Ryder runs the project and business administration and prepares the documentation. She has 13 years in the biological science industry behind her, a Bachelor of Biological Science from Deakin University, and time spent in chemical, environmental, water and algal testing laboratories.

For development work we write arborist reports for council submission in accordance with AS4970-2009, the Australian Standard for the Protection of Trees on Development Sites, and we can supply the tree protection specifications in AutoCAD or another format if that saves time on your drawings. Our town planning advice draws on the planning schemes, the local laws and the tree related overlays, and local government comes to us on development, tree retention and removal. We also handle project supervision, oversight and certification, which means regular site audits, tree protection installation, and the certification and documentation a council asks for, and we supervise excavation and root pruning near trees of significance where a permit has made that a condition.

Where you are simply worried about a tree, we do general health, condition and risk assessments with practical advice on managing it, and pest and disease identification to work out what is actually wrong before anything gets treated. Our tree surveying runs from 10 trees to 10,000, placing them with GIS and GPS to an accuracy between a metre and 10 centimetres, with photographs built into the survey where they help. At the other end there is species identification and selection, which is what decides whether the replacement is still the right tree in thirty years.

After a fire or a severe storm, the first concern is usually getting the roads open, and post bushfire and natural disaster recovery assessments come with that pressure attached. We have run many of them with systems in place so the process can be audited afterwards and no tree gets missed. All of it is done across Victoria, on Victorian planning schemes, local laws and overlays, and it covers assessment and reporting for trees in the broader landscape as well as on a single title. Ring and tell us what you are dealing with.