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10 checks · about 5 minutes

Tree health checklist

A guided walk-around inspection from the ground: crown, trunk, root flare, and site. Get a plain-language read on which findings matter and what to do next.

Most people look at a tree the way they look at a wall — as one thing, either fine or not fine. An arborist walks it in stages, and the stages are what make problems visible: stand back and read the crown, come in and walk the trunk, kneel at the root flare, then look at the ground for thirty feet around. This takes you through that walk in ten observations, in that order.

Every check is phrased as something you can actually see, and each one carries the field marks that decide it, taken from the symptom guide behind that check. Nothing here requires a ladder, a saw, or a tool you do not own. Answer honestly, including “I cannot tell” — that answer is kept separate from a no, and the results show you how to settle each one.

Two things do not wait for a checklist

If a limb is hanging over somewhere people pass, or the tree has a new lean with disturbed soil at its base, stop the walk-around and act on that. And if any part of the tree is near a power line or a service drop, contact the utility rather than a tree service — that one is not a homeowner job at any height.

Check 1 of 10 · The crown

0 of 10 answered

The crown. Stand back far enough to see the whole tree — the far side of the yard, or an upstairs window.

Dieback, thinning, or limbs coming down

Look at the top third of the tree. Are there dead, leafless twigs and bare branch tips up there while the rest of the crown still carries leaves?

Where a tree is dying tells you nearly as much as how much of it is dying. Decline that starts at the very top is the pattern worth catching early.

What counts as a yes

  • Dead, leafless twigs and branch tips concentrated in the upper third of the crown
  • Vigorous sprouts erupting from the trunk and lower limbs while the top declines
  • Vertical splits in the bark of the trunk and major limbs, sometimes with S-shaped tunnels visible underneath
  • Patches of bark scaled off by woodpeckers, leaving pale, blond wood exposed

Our tools provide general education based on your answers. They are not a diagnosis, a safety inspection, or professional advice.

Honest boundaries

What this cannot tell you

This is ten ground-level observations, answered by a homeowner, on one visit. It is a screen for the things that are visible — and there is a specific list of things it is structurally unable to see.

  • How much sound wood is left inside

    Decay works from the inside out, and a trunk can be a shell behind bark that looks perfectly normal. A cavity's opening tells you where the decay came out, not how far it has gone. Sound wood is measured on site with a mallet, a probe, or decay-detection instruments — never from a questionnaire.

  • What the roots are doing

    Roots are responsible for more tree failures and more slow declines in Kansas than every insect on the list, and they give up almost none of their evidence where you would think to look. Most root damage is invisible for two to five years, then arrives all at once in the canopy.

  • Which disease it is

    Several of the findings here have three or four possible causes that look identical from six feet away and call for completely different responses. Telling vascular wilt from root damage usually needs branch cross-sections and an excavated root collar, and pine wilt is confirmed by laboratory testing of wood samples.

  • Whether any of it is new

    A lean the tree grew into over forty years and one it acquired in June are the same observation and different objects. The checklist has no memory, and only you know what the tree looked like last season. Photographs taken from the same spot each year are worth more than any single walk-around.

  • What species you are standing under

    The same finding carries a different deadline depending on the tree. Dieback on an ash, rapid summer wilting on a red oak, and a browning pine are each decisions with a clock on them, and the checklist never asks what the tree is.

  • Anything above head height

    This is a ground-level walk-around by design. Cracks in upper limbs, deadwood in the top of the canopy, and hangers hidden directly overhead are exactly the things binoculars help with and a checklist cannot replace.

A result with nothing on it is not a clean bill of health. It means nothing in your ten answers matched a known problem pattern — which is genuinely worth knowing, and is not the same as the tree being sound. This is a screen, not an inspection. If something about the tree still bothers you, that instinct is worth more than this checklist: get someone to stand next to it.

Keep going

The guides behind these findings

Every check here is one of the symptom guides turned back into the observation that sends you to it, and every finding links to the guide it came from.

Kansas Tree Guide is an independent educational resource. Nothing on this site replaces an on-site assessment by a qualified arborist or tree-care professional. Last reviewed August 2026.