RCA, BCMA (USA)
has worked in the field of arboriculture for nearly 40 years as a commercial arborist and an independent consulting arborist. Throughout his career, Russ has taken a multidisciplinary approach to arboriculture, with a broad knowledge of trees, the environment, and the associations of trees and people. Projects include tree risk assessment and diagnosis, tree trespass, tree appraisal, personal injury and fatality cases involving trees and related issues, forensic investigations and reconstruction, tree and landscape inventories, insect and disease diagnostics, environmental analysis and mitigation, construction design and planning for trees and remediation for damaged trees, and preparation of project specifications for tree preservation and management.
Since 1983, Russ has been a Certified Arborist with the Pennsylvania-Delaware Chapter of ISA, and with the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) when the program became international in 1993. In 2004, he qualified as an ISA Board Certified Master Arborist. He has been a member and Registered Consulting Arborist of the American Society of Consulting Arborists since 1994. He taught as an instructor and coach at the ASCA Consulting Academy for 14 years. In 2010, he became a Certified Tree Risk Assessor, and in 2013 achieved the ISA Tree Risk Assessment Qualification when the program was initiated, and re qualified in March 2015.
Russ has extensive experience in the field of forensic arboriculture, working on legal cases since the beginning of his career. He developed and taught the Forensics in Arboriculture curriculum at the ASCA Academy for 6 years, has written articles about some aspects of the topic, and has coached many other arborists on issues dealing with the court and legal systems.