Palette in Practice Guide 02

Managing multiple projects and sites on Paleete

Our first guide in the series covered how to assess a site and build a planting shortlist. This guide looks at how to manage tree selection at a larger scale: organising multiple projects and sites, keeping species selections together and producing outputs for clients and colleagues.

Managing tree selection across multiple projects can quickly become complicated. Different schemes may involve multiple sites, separate client requirements, evolving species selections and input from several people.

Palette is purpose-built to support professionals working across multiple planting projects and sites. It brings climate-informed tree selection into one platform, helping you to organise your work, manage site-specific planting palettes and turn your assessments into practical outputs.

This guide will show you how to organise and manage multiple projects and sites in Palette, and how its more advanced features can support your wider workflow.

By the end of this guide, you’ll know how to:

·      Organise multiple projects and sites

·      Manage planting palettes across different locations

·      Export your species selections and reports

Who is this guide for?

In particular, this is relevant to:

·      Landscape architects and landscape designers managing several schemes

·      Arboricultural consultants working across multiple sites or client portfolios

·      Local authorities and public-sector teams overseeing tree planting programmes

·      Developers and landowners managing planting requirements across multiple developments

·      Organisations with teams involved in specifying, reviewing and approving tree selections

1.  Organising you work: Projects and sites

The system has been constructed to be as intuitive as possible for professionals managing multiple projects. Your projects sit on the main dashboard, providing a central place to manage your work. This is also where you will find the button to select add a New project.

If this is your first project, our Palette in Practice Guide 01 provides an overview of setting up a project and undertaking a site assessment.  

From the dashboard, you can see which projects are active, how many sites are associated with each project and when they were last updated.

All your projects are displayed on the main dashboard of the platform.

With a paid subscription you can add multiple sites to each project (up to 100 per project on Practitioner, unlimited on Studio). Simply open your project and select + Add site. Enter the site location and generate a separate site-specific climate assessment. You will then be able to build an individual planting palette for that location.

You can add unlimited sites on a paid subscription.

How you organise your projects is entirely up to you. The structure is flexible, so you can arrange your work in a way that reflects your needs. You might create a project for each site, street or planting programme. If you are working at a larger scale, it might be more useful to organise projects around individual clients, with multiple sites or developments within each, or around estates containing several properties and zones.

As you will see from this guide, projects are divided into sites and sites themselves can also be organised into multiple planting areas.

This flexibility allows you to keep assessments, site information and planting selections together and organised, rather than managing them separately across many different projects.

2.  Organising sites into Planting Areas

As explained in our previous guide, each new Site within a Project will generate a climate assessment. With a paid subscription you can access the platform’s full species inventory of over 300 species, all rated according to their suitability to your specific site.

You can adjust the parameters of the climate assessment as well as filter according to a comprehensive list of eco-system services and species traits to suit your planting objectives.

Sites determine the underlying climate conditions trees experience. However, in reality, sites are comprised of different planting areas that will be subjected to different microclimatic conditions and management. For example, soil conditions, light levels, moisture availability and irrigation can all influence how well a species will establish and grow. To account for these differences within a site, Palette allows you to create more detailed Planting Areas.

Planting Areas appear at the top of the specific Site page. The default settings are for a planting area in full sun, with moist, well-drained soil and no specific irrigation. Urban Heat Island (UHI) temperature adjustments are inherited from the main site assessment.

These settings can be overridden and tailored for specific planting areas within your site. You can update:

UHI: Change this setting if any significant temperature amendments are required for the planting area.

Light: Select from full sun, partial shade and full shade

Soil regime: Choose either Dry, free-draining; Moist, free-draining; Seasonally waterlogged; and Permanently Wet

Soil Texture: select you soil type

Irrigation: select between None, Establishment period and Permanent

These settings help ensure that the species selected for your palette are suited not only to the local climate, but also to the actual growing conditions in which they will be planted.

Every Planting Area inherits the site baseline settings unless you specify different conditions. This allows you to account for variation across a site, such as sunny and shared locations or areas with different soil types and moisture levels.

Input the specific planting conditions of your site

Adding multiple Planting Areas

If your site contains several distinct planting areas, you have two options to add these to your site.

Option A: Import a spreadsheet

Upload an Excel or CSV file containing your planting areas. The file should include:

·      Planting Area name: e.g Cark park edge

·      Area (m2): The area size

·      Light

·      Soil Moisture

·      Soil Texture

·      Irrigation

·      Litres per day

Click the import icon on the top right of the Planting Areas module. Palette will provide a prepared excel template that can be downloaded.

Option B: Add Planting Areas manually

Alternatively, you can use the + button to add each planting area manually, filling out the details as directed.

Once added, you will have all the specific areas of your planting site loaded into the system, which will flag any conditions that are different to the default. You will be able to build separate planting palettes for each of these planting areas.

Input specific planting areas in order to build tailored planting palettes for each, within a given site.

Existing planting areas can also be edited at any time by selecting the pen icon on the right-hand side of the planting area table. Defining individual Planting Areas helps make your species selections more precise, ensuring that each palette reflects the conditions where trees will be planted.

3.  Building and managing planting palettes

When you Planting Areas are established, select an area to explore suitable species and start building a planting palette.

The palette is displayed to the right-hand side of the species list. You can change the quantities, delete and add species as required.

From you default palette you can add named alternatives e.g Options B. C, etc.

You can also build out different palette options. The palette you are creating will be named the default, but you can press the turquoise + button at the top of the palette box to create an additional palette or alternative options. This is useful when comparing different species combinations or preparing options for discussions with clients and colleagues.

When you are ready to add more detail, select Open Schedule. This opens your Planting Schedule where you can specify details such as:

·      Tree size and grade

·      Stock type, such as bare root, rootballed, container-grown or cell-grown

·      Any additional notes relevant to the specification

You can edit, delete and add, including duplicating species to include different sizes or stock of the same species.

Adding these details takes your palette beyond an initial species shortlist. It helps turn your climate and site suitability assessment into a more detailed planting schedule that can support specification, procurement and communication with clients and contractors.

The planting schedule enables you to add further details to your planting palette.

4. Exporting your planting palettes and reports

Throughout the platform, there are opportunities to export assessments and planting palettes. You can do so either as a PDF report, an excel file or a CSV depending on your needs and preferences.

These outputs help you take your work beyond the platform. You might need a concise overview for a client discussion, a detailed planting schedule for project development or a data file to use in your own project records.

The planting palette export includes a summary of your site, the species in your palette and their suitability to the future climate conditions or the specific site and their specific planting area within that site.

It summarises the site conditions and includes:

·      Planting Schedule,

·      Species Traits in relation to the specific area conditions,

·      Climate suitability

·      Ecosystem Services and Allergens information

·      Detailed Species Profiles

·      Supporting technical and scientific trait data for each species.

Together, this information provides a record of your selections and the conditions informing them.

Download your planting palette with detailed data on every selection.

From site assessment to professional planting planning

As your projects grow, Palette gives you the tools to manage tree selection across multiple sites and planting areas. From assessing local climate and growing conditions to developing detailed planting palettes and schedules, you can bring more of your tree selection process together in one place.

Once your planting palettes have been developed, the next step is often to share them with colleagues, clients or other project stakeholders for review and approval. Palette's collaboration features support this process, allowing you to assign roles, manage access and bring feedback and decisions into the same platform.

A paid Palette subscription unlocks these additional capabilities, alongside features such as unlimited projects and sites, access to over 300 assessed tree species, population audits and detailed exports. Together, they can support a more connected approach to managing tree selection, from initial assessment through to review and approval.

Ready to get more from Palette? Explore the available subscription plans to find features that best support your projects and your team.

Next in the Palette in Practice series: Auditing an Existing Tree Population.