A survey on rope-based ascending techniques and materials of professional arborists in Italy

The techniques funded on rope-based access to the tree canopy (the so-called tree-climbing) have been spreading in recent years. A variety of practices such as pruning, felling of trees, cabling, phytosanitary inspections and others, can be carried out using these techniques and the methods allow to operate on trees placed in any location, resulting extremely suitable to maintain trees grown in urban environment. In Italy the number of arborists operating with rope on trees is increasing strongly. They are usually highly specialized professionals and they use specific techniques and materials. Despite the diffusion of these techniques in modern arboriculture, it is not easy to find sound ad updated information and data on them. In this work, based mainly on the answers obtained with a specific questionnaire addressed to 86 Italian professional climbers, some aspects of the applied techniques were reported. The paper shows data on professional training and formation, on the work organization, on the utilized materials and equipment and on the use and maintenance of personal protective equipment (PPE). In general, a large variety of situations are reported, a result probably linked to the fast grown of the sector in the last years.