Surveying
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Imagine planting enough new trees to cover a plot of land the size of Switzerland. Now do it again and again, nearly 500 times, until you’ve covered two billion hectares. It’s a huge, seemingly overwhelming ef - fort. Yet a Dutch company is using advanced geospatial technologies to make it happen. From its base in Amsterdam, Land Life Company works to restore lands degraded by natural or human activities such as wildfire, de- sertification, agriculture, and urbanization. It’s one of a small handful of companies capable of large-scale tree planting services needed to reestablish forests and create productive landscapes. With projects in 25 countries on five continents, Land Life clients include governments and corporations seeking to reinvigorate damaged land and soils or to offset carbon released by commercial activities. Since its founding in 2013, Land Life has planted nearly 1.3 million trees. Successful tree planting comes in bunches. At each project location, new trees are planted in groups to provide protection against the wind. The young trees spread naturally to fill in and enlarge the new forest. Eventually the soil improves to support new plant life and further aid in carbon capture. But it’s difficult to plant trees successfully on a large scale and Land Life plants trees by the thousands. Logistics are complex and costs for sapling trees, supplies, labor, and equipment add up quickly. To optimize the cost-to-benefit ratio, Land Life needs to achieve a high rate of success for the trees it plants; the young trees need to grow and remain healthy in order to produce the long-term benefits. Foraging the Forests To reach and maintain success, Land Life monitors the new trees through periodic visits to measure parameters such as height and health. Combined with information on the tree species, location, soils, and environmental conditions, the data supports informed decisions in planning the next round of planting and enables Land Life to adjust variables such as soil amendments and watering approaches. “We are gathering as much data as we can,” says Tom Janmaat, a data scientist at Land Life. “We're shaving costs in the operations and using our knowledge to optimize performance. The next steps will be ecologi - cal gains: making sure that you plant the right trees in the right spot at the right time. Scientific knowledge is available, and we think we can get even better. We can help improve our knowledge base by gathering data on how our trees grow: Learning what works and what doesn't.” Seeing the Forest for the Trees Geospatial technology boosts efforts to rebuild forests and reestablish landscapes By John Stenmark
Janmaat explained that Land Life records as much data as possible on factors that could influence the trees’ growth and survival rates, then analyzes how the various parameters influence each other. Thanks to its rigorous statistical practices, Land Life needs to monitor only a fraction of its trees. On a planting of a hundred thousand trees, they typically monitor a few thousand to produce a good sample of every combination of tree species and treatments in a given field. Monitoring tree performance is a labor-intensive process. To control costs, the company is working to improve productivity in its moni - toring efforts. For example, it developed an in-house smartphone app to guide users through the capture of information on a tree’s species, height and health. In order for the information to be useful, field teams must be sure that they visit the same tree every time. When dealing with thousands of nearly identical trees, it’s not a simple task. That’s where GNSS comes in. For years, Land Life attached small paper tags with unique QR codes to the trees selected for monitoring. While the codes ensured accurate identification of specific trees, they required the monitoring personnel to carry a separate QR reader and crawl on the ground to reach and scan the tag. The method was further compromised by the fact that some QR tags were torn off and lost each year. So Land Life turned to satellite positioning using the GPS receivers built into the team mem- bers’ smartphones. That decision led to a new challenge: accuracy. In open fields and with access to a cellular network, a smartphone’s built-in GPS can provide positions accurate to roughly three meters. The accuracy is worse when working in treed areas or locations where cellular signals are not available—conditions where Land Life does much of its work. With trees spaced three to four meters apart, the smartphone GPS can’t provide the accuracy needed to confidently identify and return to the same tree repeatedly. Land Life needed the ability to measure to within one meter. Technicians measure a tree height and record data on a smartphone. Monitoring is an essential part of successful high-volume tree planting.
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November 2021 csengineermag.com
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