Climate change and human activities have placed unforeseen pressure on forest ecosystems. This has resulted in a loss of biodiversity. In simple terms, biodiversity describes the variety and variability of living things within an area. This diversity is important, as it helps to maintain the stability in forest ecosystems and improves the resilience of forests against weather-extremes, diseases, and pests.
While human actions have caused biodiversity loss, human actions can also help to retain and increase forest biodiversity. To answer questions, such as what and where, there is an urgent need for biodiversity-related information. The problem is, however, that biodiversity is a complex concept and quantifying it is challenging especially on a large scale. As a result, there currently is no standardized way of measuring and quantifying biodiversity of large areas.
A Comprehensive Approach to Quantifying Forest Biodiversity
Realizing the need for large scale biodiversity information, KOKO Forest – A forest analytics startup founded in 2022 – aims to quantify biodiversity using remotely sensed metrics. Their solution is a novel biodiversity index – a value that describes how biodiverse a specific area is. Acknowledging that biodiversity is a multifaceted concept, the biodiversity index is decomposed into three subcomponents: species diversity, structural diversity, and deadwood.
This allows users of the index to better understand why a specific area has been assigned a specific value. The biodiversity index is computed based on well-established indicators of biodiversity, such as the presence of deadwood and aspens, and the structural diversity of the forest. These indicators of biodiversity are all identifiable from aerial imagery and airborne laser scanning data with the aid of recent advancements in computer vision methods.
There are multiple needs for a biodiversity index:
- The fine-scale biodiversity data helps forest managers in making precise and sustainable forest management decisions,
- The biodiversity index allows businesses to identify and compensate for their ecological footprint,
- The biodiversity index could be used in ESG reporting and help investors estimate the ecological risk of their investments.
Transforming Tree Detection into Biodiversity Insights: A Startup’s Journey
KOKO Forest has been previously focused on monitoring forest health and tree mortality. The startup has developed a deep learning-based approach for detecting individual dead trees from aerial imagery. The idea for the biodiversity index came after realizing that the developed methodology could be utilized for a novel purpose.
The Beyond Dead Wood Hackathon organized in the beginning of March was the perfect starting point for turning this novel idea into something more concrete. The R&D team of KOKO Forest, consisting of scientists with backgrounds in forest sciences, ecology, and geoinformatics, managed to come up with a proof-of-concept solution that earned them the first place in the Hackathon. While the product is still in its early stages, the startup sees great potential in it and is looking to develop the product into a viable business case.
To learn more about KOKO Forest, visit their website.
