Owner and operator of Tree Awareness, Inc. since 1993. New Jersey Licensed Tree Expert. Tree Risk Assessment Qualified. ISA Member. Thirty-plus years of arboriculture practice in South Jersey, documented one field call at a time.
On the property
Every estimate, every risk report, every plan begins with Paul on the ground — reading the tree, the soil, the storm patterns, the structure. Thirty years of South Jersey fieldwork built the diagnostic instinct, and TRAQ qualification keeps it honest.
“Before a saw ever comes out, we understand the tree.”
Paul Biester is the owner and operator of Tree Awareness, Inc. He founded the company in 1993 and has run continuous arboriculture practice across South Jersey for more than thirty years. The work covers pruning, removal, plant health care, tree risk assessment, consulting arboriculture, and emergency response — on residential properties, estate properties, multi-unit communities, municipal contracts, and the occasional crisis-response call.
Paul holds New Jersey Licensed Tree Expert #408, a credential issued by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection that authorizes the practice of arboriculture in the state. He is Tree Risk Assessment Qualified through the International Society of Arboriculture, the industry-standard methodology for evaluating tree risk on residential and commercial properties. He is an ISA Member. Tree Awareness is a TCIA Accredited Company — the company has earned the accreditation for three consecutive cycles, a designation held by a small fraction of tree-care companies in the region.
Paul has been documenting his field work in writing and on video since 2018, originally on the company’s Squarespace site and now on this WordPress build. The body of work currently runs to forty field-filmed posts across pests and disease, pruning technique, tree risk assessment, foundational arboriculture concepts, and case studies on real South Jersey properties. Most posts include a verbatim transcript of what Paul said on site, paired with the prose that explains the technical reasoning behind it.
The pattern is intentional. Arboriculture is a craft that depends on accumulated pattern recognition, and the only way the next generation of arborists learns the work is by watching experienced practitioners read trees in the field. The video record matters. The reasoning record matters. The two together are the closest thing to formal apprenticeship in a trade that operates mostly outside any institutional teaching infrastructure.
Day-to-day, Paul leads the Tree Awareness crew on jobs across Gloucester, Camden, Salem and Cumberland counties — 88 municipalities in the company’s service area. He performs site visits and risk assessments personally, particularly on heritage trees and high-value specimens where the keep-or-remove call needs experienced judgment. He climbs trees on jobs that benefit from a senior climber. He runs the resistograph and the visual TRAQ assessments on properties that bring him out for that specific work.
The crew — profiled on the team page — handles the day-to-day routine maintenance pruning, removals, and plant health care visits across the service area. Paul is on the larger or more technical jobs, the consulting visits, the assessments, and the field-clip recordings.
Paul co-hosts The Aging Arborist, a podcast on arboriculture practice, tree care business operations, and conversations with practitioners across the industry. The podcast features long-form interviews with climbers, consultants, equipment operators, and other working arborists across the country.
Tree Awareness participates annually in Saluting Branches, the nationwide pro-bono day of service for tree-care professionals working at veteran cemeteries.
Tree Awareness, Inc. is headquartered in our office, NJ. The company has been continuously operating since 1993, and is a five-time recipient of Best of Gloucester County. The crew includes Paul, Mia, Mason, Mikaela, and Madison — profiled on the Meet the Team page.
The company’s tagline — Less invasive. More in harmony. — reflects the practice philosophy. Tree Awareness leans toward preservation when the structural data supports it. Annual reassessment cycles. Year-over-year relationships with the same properties and the same trees. Pruning to ANSI A300 standards. Soil work as the foundation of plant health care, not just nutrient injection.
For a site visit, a consultation, or a tree risk assessment, the entry points are the services page and the contact page. For a long-form view of how Paul approaches the work, start with the TRAQ + Resistograph methodology pillar or the CODIT foundational concept on the Tree Tips knowledge base.
For a TRAQ-qualified visual assessment on a tree on your property, request a Tree Risk Assessment →
Credentials · held continuously since 1993
Tree work in New Jersey requires a license. Tree work that’s done well requires more than that.
