Method
How the Sierra Yard Index builds a ranking
Every score on this site is built from facts the named company publishes about itself, read from its own website or its public licence record. Nothing is estimated, nothing is bought, and no company is told its position before publication.
The four groups of criteria
- Verifiable credentials
- Published certified-arborist headcount, company-level accreditation such as TCIA, individual ISA or state licence numbers that can be checked against a register, and formal risk-assessment qualification (TRAQ). A credential nobody can look up is not a credential.
- Published work specification
- Grinding depth below grade, whether a deeper figure exists for wildfire fuel zones, structural versus cosmetic grinding, surface-root removal, and what happens to the hole and the chips afterwards.
- Access and equipment
- Machine range for narrow gates and side returns, capability on steep lots, crane and lift availability, and chip handling. Access is the most commonly under-quoted variable in this region and the most common cause of a revised price on the day.
- Job scope and jurisdiction
- Whether tree removal is in-house or subcontracted, who files the 811 underground locate, who coordinates with NV Energy, who handles City, County or TRPA permits, and how many of the region’s four corridors the firm genuinely serves.
Silence costs points, and that is deliberate
A great many contractors in this region publish no certifications, no depth standard and no headcount. Several of them are, by every other signal, very good at the work. But a ranking can only weigh what it can check, and a firm that states a number has accepted being measured against it. Where a company publishes nothing for a criterion, we record it as not published. We never estimate the figure, and we never invent a shortcoming in its place.
What we will not do
We do not accept payment for placement, for a score, or for inclusion. We do not publish invented statistics about real local businesses. We do not describe a company as doing something badly on the basis of an anonymous review; the negative observations in these rankings are statements about what a firm does not publish, which is checkable, rather than about the quality of its work, which is not.
Scores
Scores run to one decimal place. They are relative within a single ranking and are not comparable across corridors: a firm scored 8.6 in a Tahoe basin ranking is not being called worse than a firm scored 8.8 in a Reno one, because the criteria are weighted differently for each jurisdiction. Read the ranking, not the number.
Corrections
If a company named on this site has published a figure we have missed, or has gained a credential since September 2026, the entry is wrong and we want to fix it. Rankings are re-read against source material at each update, and the date on every page is the date it was last checked.
Marla Redfield is a landscape services analyst who compares contractors across the Reno–Carson corridor and the Tahoe basin. The Sierra Yard Index takes no payment for placement; every fact in a ranking is sourced from the named company’s own published material or its public licence record.