What Dead Trees Taught Me About Data Preservation

One Tuesday morning in October, while walking the rows, I noticed several trees on the verge of assured death. I could see a couple of bare branches and split barks. I couldn't help but feel despair, since this was the kind of death that settled and went unnoticed over time.

 

I had been documenting this orchard for two seasons. I thought I understood what was here. What I did not understand, however, was how little of it had ever been properly recorded.

 

The Loss That Changed How I Work

 

The worst thing was that several of those trees were grafted cultivars. The rootstock from which they were developed was no longer available for purchase. One tree was the only surviving clone from a rare variety that the source in the nearby field has since been sold.

 

My first instinct as a surveyor is to request the records. To my surprise, I was handed a notebook damaged by water. Additional information came in the way of untagged images with no metadata or labels. I quickly came to a painful realisation that I had been making a mistake. Instead of building a system to capture and reliably store data, I was busy collecting data to no end.

 

Building a Robust Documentation System

 

After losing those extensive records, I resorted to rebuilding my approach around three layers. Each one is simple, but together they create something resilient.

 

1. The Field Record

 

Every tree in every orchard I document now gets a unique identifier. The format is straightforward: Orchard code - Row number - Position number (e.g., SOM-04-R3-P7). This identifier goes on a weatherproof label attached to the tree and into a master spreadsheet as the primary key.

 

2. Geotagged Photography

 

I acquired a small Bluetooth GPS logger, which I paired with my camera. I employ a simple piece of free software called GPSBabel to match each image timestamp to the nearest GPS point. This changed everything. Every photograph is tagged, meaning I now know exactly where the image was taken.

 

3. Offsite Redundancy

 

I maintain three copies of my archive: one on my working laptop, one on an external drive at home, and another in cloud storage that syncs automatically. I also export a flat CSV of the master spreadsheet at the end of each season. This makes the data universally readable, even if software becomes obsolete.

 

What Version Control Taught Me About Orchards

 

The single biggest shift in how I think about documentation came from reading about version control systems used in software development. The core principle is: never delete and always append. Every change is a new record, not an edit of the old one. History is an asset.

 

When a tree dies or is removed, I do not delete its record. I add a new row with the date, the cause of loss, and a flag marking it as no longer active. This method of handling data matters more than it sounds. Pattern recognition across losses has already helped me identify a drainage issue in one orchard.

 

The Takeaway

 

The question is not whether to record data. Most people are already doing that. The question is whether your records can survive you. Whether someone else could open your files in five years and understand what they are looking at without asking you questions.