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[Music] welcome to uh another episode of trees and lines at the trees and utilities conference we're thrilled to welcome Greg doll uh from West Virginia University indeed um he has a very very colorful background in industry and Academia and we're going to get to know him a little bit and what he's up to so Greg please tell us a little bit about yourself well thanks for inviting me here it's great to be here in Pittsburgh for uh the conference strees and utility uh my name is Greg Dolly as you said um I I'm teaching arbac culture and urban forestry at West Virginia University um my background you of course I have an academic background but I also came from industry as well um I was a practicing arborist out in California uh both in utility sector as well as in the commercial sector uh so I worked uh involved with the PG out in California doing some tree inventory and managing pole clearing projects to try to reduce fire loading uh on their circuits um and then I moved on into industry or moved on into commercial sales and I was selling down in the South Bay Silicon Valley area uh tree work for a local tree care company um and I did that both of those together for about seven years before I returned to graduate school for uh my masters and PhD and that's when I ended up here at uh West Virginia West Virginia okay this is your Alma M right yeah West Virginia is mine yep yeah so you teach when people get out of West Virginia do they know about utility uh arbac culture yes well first we're biased because we both are involved with West Virginia University which has strong history in utility arbic culture um when I teach my arbic culture class I teach that in the fall in the spring I teach an urban Force management I see that as tree care or large management um in my arbic culture class we spent a few lectures talking about trees growing around proximity of power lines and how to prun them properly as best we can to keep the the power lines on um I spent a little bit more time looking at how urban forestry how utility forestry is really part of urban forestry you know as you know we're managing large swats of land and trees that impact everybody every day long we forget about the importance of utility forestry until the power goes out and we don't realize what what our industry does until that time so I try to encourage my students that this is a good sector and uh about a third of our students end up in our forestry students end up in arbac culture and probably I would say more than half of them into the utility industry so I I'm happy about that so why do you think West Virginia is one of the few I mean it just amazes me that we can't get schools to recognize utility forestry there are a few I mean Wisconsin with Steven's Point used to and still does do a lot with that um I think it's because longterm we haven't seen utility given the respect that it deserves as I said to you it's urban forestry we Nationwide we've really Incorporated urban forestry into all the ecosystem services and all the benefits that we get and they don't see utility a part of that so I think a lot of the academics themselves don't see the interest in that and see the importance in that and I think a lot of the students don't feel that until they get into industry and start realizing how much we love the land and how much we love the trees that we take care of it's a great IND and the people do care you know they just don't hear about it until they get into it I didn't I I didn't I really didn't know about utility until I got the job out west and as soon as I can honestly say a buddy that used to live here that I met out in California um about a month into it I said I found my career I was a wildlife student I was going to do utility long enough to find that Wildlife job nearly 30 years later I'm still not looking for that Wildlife job I'm quite content where I'm at yeah good good like Phil you're you're a bit of an exception in this industry in this sector because you know you do have higher degrees right you're you know a PhD in the space like Phil and which fascinates me that you've committed yourself to to that level of continued education and and research um what prompted you to want to leave industry and go back though into Academia was it just like were you seeing things and and feeling like hey I've got to I've got to dig a Little Deeper because we're operating at a more of a surface level like what was the driving factor to send you back to West Virginia to be honest the driving Factor was when I was an undergrad I was a non-traditional undergrad I didn't get my degree till I was almost 30 so I was always I've always been a non-traditional person as far as just figure out where I want to be and I'm going to be there eventually yep um I wanted to I I love academic I love teaching um I really knew as an undergraduate an older undergraduate that I wanted to teach um and again I wanted to do Wildlife yep that didn't car lay out very well cuz there just aren't very many jobs as soon as I discovered uh utility and utility forestry I knew where my passion was was developing and where it was going to go um so as I had worked for about 5 years and knew I wanted to return to graduate school I knew this is where I wanted to go I was benefited that I um I had spent time doing some research projects when I was with the the consulting company and I did some work for PG doing a couple different research projects and that introduced research to me so I knew that a lot more to learn and a lot more and I I see our research is the extension research in one respect the extension component that a lot of universities have not only do we do the research but we set we assemble everyone else's research and try to get that information out to the public and I think that's really what drew me towards the academic side is trying to get information out to the practitioner to make them to allow them to be better at their management that that's great because that's one of the real challenges so many of the research goes into a journal and so many of our members don't read journals no so it'll be years to get that information into the field and that's something we've been trying to do with the UAA we got a research committee with UAA um and we realize I don't know about you but if I want to fall asleep all I got to do is pull out a research journal or two and I will fall asleep it is a great cure for insomnia and I I respect practitioners going this is too heady too we have to write our research papers in a scientific manner in order to get it published but it doesn't make for good reading and a simple one page or something like that so um I I realize and so to a lot of people within within the UAA and with our industry we've got to find a way to summarize these these information these these data sheets that are out there to try to get into something that is Meaningful to the practitioner easy to read while you're on your lunch hour or while you got a 20-minute break if you ever have that during the day yeah research you uh got a grant this year right from tree fund was it the utility arst research fund I have received two utility Arbor research funds grants the last two years they're basically partnered with each other so it's a continuation the one I got this year um and what I'm trying to do is I am trying to look at utility outage reports uh the tree cause outage reports to try to what I'd like to do is collect as many tree outage reports as I can across the US and even our partners up in Canada and trying to build as large of a database as possible to try to Big the power of Big Data uh machine learning to try to understand why we have failures both within the RightWay and as we all know a lot of times those failures are outside the rideway so I'm trying to find out trying to assemble that database to look at what are the leading causes and the reasons uh whether topography or tree species height size anything like that so you're going to the uh all the utilities you want to go I know you're just starting so so what's your request you got people listening so my request is um and my my name is Greg doll at West Virginia University so my my hope is that if I can reach out to you or you can reach out to me I'm trying to collect any any company utility uh any Co-op any uh tree care company that has been utility services that has databases that they can share with me um I'm hoping to compile these databases into one larger database so I can uh have a graduate student a doctorate student look at that uh so my request is to contact me and I'd be happy to uh work with you to make sure that the data is confidential that I don't share stuff that you don't want I can wash the data of the client information you can wash it yourself I don't need to have the circuit name or anything like that I'm happy to have that but um so I can collect as large of a database from across the US and into Canada if possible to help us as an industry really understand why we have outages so this is a lot of utilities that do postevent investigations yes preferably by an arbis rather than lineman but even the lineman dat is better than not a lot of people heard you so hopefully we get some response thank you how do people sort of find out about your program like the students like are they specifically looking for you do they typically fall into it from other Majors like um yeah tell me a little bit about that Dynamic so again my program arbic culture and urban forestry is housed within the major forestry and natural resources okay uh so many of the students who are already in the forest Resource Management program they're they're finding out because oh my class is an elective so they're taking the class oh this sounds interesting um and maybe I get a chance to climb a tree which always entices people um but we also find a lot of students that are coming in to the greater realm of school of aags or biology that are interested in something a little more panson and they they they hear about what we can do in forestry they're interested in Wildlife or water studies or something like that and they realize what a natural resource manager does and then that's how they really find our program our major but then with with arbic culture I think it's Happ stance unfortunately I I think our universities don't don't sell our profession nearly as well as they could what would you say if someone like me who's in industry and certainly I don't come from the space but there are things that I'm seeing that I would want to explore more more from a a depth of understanding data information do you partner with industry players where you can we can do these mini research projects to to try to solve a particular idea problem or just get a deeper understanding is that something that the university allows you to do yeah most universities I mean you can do that one or two ways to be honest um most universities with a research Grant are more than happy you know give us some money and we'll we we'll partner with you and do a research um at the same um we're allowed to do some work that's external to the university that fits within the realm of the University so we're allowed to do some of that call IT consulting work that we can reach out and tackle a specific problem got it um and either partner the university name with it or maybe lightly or strongly partner the name of the University along with it are you from West Virginia originally no I'm not um while I was born out in California I grew up in Indiana I was we moved when I was four so I'm a Northeast Indiana Fort Wayne native um and I moved I've moved around I lived on the East Coast lived on the west coast uh did graduate studies on the east coast and I I landed in this wonderful State Phil you know it it's a gorgeous State we're just an hour south of here it's absolutely Beau I I've been here 12 years and it's just it's it's Heaven it's love yeah oh that's fantastic that's fantastic so you're looking around what other research do you see down the road what areas are you focusing on my focus and I didn't talk about that in my background uh my doctorate work in most of my post work as a University faculty member has been looking to treat biomechanics so what I see this utility work that I'm doing looking at tree failures it's not looking specifically is that root strong enough is the trunk heavily decayed but looking at the bigger picture of why are trees falling over is the soil stable is the tree stable itself um so for what I'm interested in mostly is why are trees holding together throughout all our storms as we see more storms and increasing the amount of storms why are trees able to stay together not fall over and therefore the converse of that is why are they falling over um and I a lot I've recently become a tree risk assessor trainer for uh Isa and I'm really interested in seeing if we look at that lik hood of failure likelihood of impact consequences and then partnering not partnering but looking at what John Goodfellow did with writing the UT the utility tree risk assessment uh bmps how we can use that protocol to try to understand how to manage whether it be the tree risk assessment individual trees which I'm still very interested in or from the utility sector looking at the whole circuit wide I mean that I like how John population approach which is really urban forestry right MH yeah that's right yeah have you been coming to this conference every year like has this been part of your core visit I really don't want to admit this this is my first time really it it always comes at a difficult time of the year for me I teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays and usually Al sometimes on Wednesdays um as much as I enjoy coming to conferences I'm employed at the university the students pay my bill I don't know how much of my money comes from where where my salary comes from but I know a good portion of it is paid by the students right and I I feel that I owe them to be in the classroom by failure to go to a classroom means they're not getting my information and they're not they're paying me to sit and not do their work or work with them so I'd love to be here more often I took advantage of Pittsburgh being so close that I can come up yeah oh that's this in what the first two weeks of school can't be a good time exactly yeah and that's that's always been the problem with the trees and utility for me is just just is hard to get away from yeah I'm surprised cuz I've seen you at conferences all the time never occurred to me not this conference yeah when Phil and I first started working together you know I was very interested in you know having Phil you know write white papers and on things that are happening and we we sort of when we fleshed it out we realized that like the Paradigm of how people get their information has changed and how they digest information that's actually that feel good that's what kind of prompted us to to start trees and lines actually um and create like digital content so yeah in conversations with Phil in the past um we've tried to figure out how we can get more students to something like this and um it is a challenge to get students to travel to give up a whole day of classroom or two days of classes when there's papers due and homework and test and yesterday I had my first test in my arbic culture class and a lot of professors are having test so we've been in school a month now actually okay um and some of you some universities start at different time periods um I think this podcast other modern ways of getting communication out to the students that as a faculty if I if I see podcasts that I can bring in and short blips that I can bring into the classroom give as homework assignments watch this and tell me what you've learned I think that is another way that we can actually engage our student population and show them where career paths lie cuz most of us I don't know Phil when you were doing your undergraduate did you have any clue that there is a field of urban forestry and arbac culture certainly not urban forestry I knew about utility forestry before I knew about Urban forry oh really okay because I came through the Ken carll's there you go yeah that explains it so Ken carll was a professor of really civil culture and Dy uh West Virginia University and just passed away two years ago maybe um but did he really did a lot with the early entrance of Academia into utility forestry hundreds of the first people in the industry came through Ken carvell when I was out working in the temporary positions out in PG for in California we hired a lot of people from WVU and it was because of Ken plus his soul he was great it would be great to moderate a panel with the two of you and John and uh maybe a couple of Industry practitioners and maybe let your students observe that dialogue and that conversation and see the different ways everyone's thinking about you know the same subject that' be that'd be quite interesting but another interesting person to bring into that would be um um Rich how oh yeah who just left Wisconsin University of Wisconsin but he he has both the academic realm and now the industry realm which would be another good mindset to bring in we should definitely uh we should explore that but I really appreciate you taking the time today and doing doing some great work at you know West Virginia and look forward to continuing to chat with you keep us thank you very much this if you do Post out each investigations get hold of GG yes please I I would love to have a a way to talk to you about receiving any data because I truly believe a lot some of the utilities and some of the Consulting companies have looked at small data sets but when we can compile a very large data base then we can use power the power of big data and machine learning to actually maybe bring us forward in our industry so I think it' be great very good luck good excellent it was a pleasure yeah all right absolutely that's it for this episode of trees and lines brought to you by iapetus Holdings if you like the show please give us a festar rating on Apple or Spotify if you have any questions or comments on any of our episodes or ideas for topics or guests we'd love to hear from you please contact us at trees and lines atapis llc.com we'll chat with you [Music] soon