Overview
Tilhill Forestry is a leading sustainable forestry and timber harvesting company with a dedicated ecology team responsible for conducting ecological site assessments. Their work is critical to wildlife conservation – conducting a number of surveys including Ground Level Tree Assessments (GLTAs), Preliminary Ecological Appraisals (PEAs) and breeding bird surveys before any forestry work begins, ensuring forest managers receive clear guidance and appropriate licensing advice.
We caught up with Principal Ecologist Jack Dunn to learn how Coreo has transformed their workflows.
The Challenge
Before adopting Coreo, the team relied on a fragmented setup of paper forms, legacy software and open-source tools like QField and QGIS. While QGIS handled the spatial tasks, it required a high level of technical expertise that not everyone on the team possessed.
Project setup was also a major bottleneck. Setting up projects was so time-consuming that it would often take Jack entire days before he could even set foot on site. Furthermore, their existing tools lacked multi-user capabilities, meaning team members couldn’t survey different parts of a site simultaneously in real time.
When the third-party app they relied on for Phase 1 surveys went out of development, the team was forced back to paper surveys. Recognising the need for a modern, unified solution, Jack recommended the team transition to Coreo and UKHab survey workflows.
The Solution
Now in their third year of using Coreo, Jack and the team are thrilled with how much faster and simpler field data collection has become. Coreo’s no-code customisation allows Jack to tailor survey forms to exact site requirements, and it also eliminates tedious data double-handling.
“Before Coreo, digitising a GLTA project meant up to a day of manual admin. Now, that same process is completed in just a couple of hours.”
Jack Dunn | Principal Ecologist | Tilhill Forestry
Key Results & Impact
- Instant Team Onboarding: The entire team was up and running with Coreo effortlessly, regardless of their prior GIS experience and only required light internal training.
- Real-Time Collaboration: Multiple ecologists can now work on the same site survey simultaneously, with live updates synced across devices.
- Clear Contractor Guidance: Standardised digital outputs provide forestry contractors with clear, unambiguous instructions on protected features to avoid during felling operations.
- Custom Raster Maps: The ability to upload custom raster basemaps gives field surveyors far greater context and spatial reference while on site.
Looking Ahead
User feedback is key to shaping Coreo’s product development and Jack is one of our clients working with our product team to help build a more streamlined and efficient PEA workflow.
Additionally, a custom Bat Tree Habitat Key (BTHK) form that Jack independently built within his own Coreo workspace, is in the pipeline and will be made available to all Coreo users as a standard template.
