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Ken James is a great supporter of Women Of The Trees (WOTT) and has shared his extensive knowledge and musings on wind loads on trees with WOTT members all over the world.

Outlined below is the Introduction from his latest paper:
Dynamic Wind Loads on Trees (see the pdf document below for the full paper)
by Ken James
Research Engineer
Burnley College
University of Melbourne
Australia

Introduction

This article reports on research being conducted at Burnley College, University of Melbourne,
Australia. After several years of studying the dynamic loads in tree cables in high winds,
further work has developed to measure the dynamic forces on trees during wind storms.
Results indicate that trees are a complex dynamic system in which branches interact to
prevent dangerous sway motion developing. To quote Shigo, “A tree without branches is not a tree”. Up till now, there have been many simplified models of trees, which often consider the tree as a single pole, and many of the studies have been computer simulations. The major focus of the present work is to find out how real trees behave in real wind storms. There is little published actual field data on the dynamic forces experienced by trees in real storms so new instruments have been designed to measure dynamic wind forces on trees.

Article - Dynamic wind loads on trees

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