Challenge:

The protection and restoration of ecosystems around the world is a major issue for governments, businesses, and local populations. Healthy ecosystems with rich biodiversity have more fertile soils, bigger yields of timber and fish, and larger stores of greenhouse gases, supporting peoples’ health and livelihoods.

Many of the world’s largest companies are investing in restoring damaged ecosystems, but face challenges in consistently measuring and evidencing their impact.

Treeconomy wants to increase traceability, transparency, and trust in ecosystem restoration efforts, particularly tree planting and reforestation, worldwide.

To do this, they are harnessing drone and satellite imagery to track and monitor the growth of trees and measure how much carbon they are sequestering from the atmosphere as they do.

Solution:

Treeconomy joined the ESA BIC UK to access funding, networks and affiliated experts working in earth observation and land management monitoring.

The Satellite Applications Catapult provided a review of their imagery analysis methods and carbon stock estimates generation.

Experts in forest monitoring at the University of Leicester assisted them with the development of their detection models and helped them improve their ability to fuse different geospatial data layers, from drone to satellite, resulting in greater accuracy of their carbon assessments over time.

Impact:

Through the ESA BIC UK, Treeconomy accessed expertise in earth observation and land management monitoring. This was crucial in helping them build satellite-based tree counting into their commercial products and in doing so, to drive down the costs and improve their ability to scale.

Between joining and graduating the ESA BIC UK, Treeconomy’s team more than doubled to twelve and closed their pre-seed investment rounds.

Since graduating the ESA BIC UK, Treeconomy has continued to scale through product launches, partnerships and contracts, including with the UK Space Agency.

“The technical support from ESA BIC has been of real help to Treeconomy. Our focus is on providing best-in-class quantification and monitoring for nature restoration projects; ESA’s network of experts has been able to support us as we build new and novel monitoring programmes for Afforestation, Reforestation & Revegetation (ARR) projects, ensuring Treeconomy’s monitoring programme is on the cutting edge.”

Harry Grocott, CEO & co-founder