Tag Archives: forests
Biomass Of Northern Hemisphere Forests Mapped
ANI inShare Washington, June 27 (ANI): Thanks to satellites, the biomass of the northern hemisphere’s forests has been mapped with greater precision to help improve our understanding of the carbon cycle and our prediction of Earth’s future climate. Accurately measuring forest biomass and how it varies are key elements for taking stock of forests and vegetation. Since forests assist in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, mapping forest biomass is also important for understanding the global carbon cycle. In particular, northern forests – including forest soil – store a third more carbon stocks per hectare as tropical forests, making them one of the most significant carbon stores in the world. The boreal forest ecosystem – exclusive to the northern hemisphere – spans Russia, northern Europe, Canada and Alaska, with interrelated habitats of forests, lakes, wetlands, rivers and tundra. With processing software drawing in stacks of radar images from ESA’s Envisat satellite, scientists have created a map of the whole northern hemisphere’s forest biomass in higher resolution than ever before – each pixel represents 1 km on the ground. “Single Envisat radar images taken at a wavelength of approximately 5 cm cannot provide the sensitivity needed to map the composition of forests with high density,” Maurizio Santoro from Gamma Remote Sensing said. “Combining a large number of radar datasets, however, yields a greater sensitivity and gives a more accurate information on what’s below the forest canopy,” Santoro said. About 70 000 Envisat radar images from October 2009 to February 2011 were fed into this new, ‘hyper-temporal’ approach to create the pan-boreal map for 2010. This is the first radar-derived output on biomass for the whole northern zone using a single approach – and it is just one of the products from the Biomasar-II project. (ANI) Continue reading
The App Craze Branches into Forestry
A startup has developed software and smartphone tools for cataloguing the trees in forests. By Conor Myhrvold on June 25, 2013 WHY IT MATTERS F orests are among the planet’s most biologically diverse and valuable places. Wrap around: SilviaTerra cofounders Zack Parisa (right) and Max Uhlenhuth demonstrate old and new inventory techniques in the field. In a small office near Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just across from Starbucks, is a small startup with a big idea for balancing biodiversity with business. SilviaTerra has developed better ways to identify and quantify the trees in forests, using smartphones and satellite imagery. The company’s goal is to help landowners, conservation groups, and timber companies manage their inventory and preserve valuable natural habitats. From the Amazon and Indonesia to temperate regions such as the Olympic Peninsula and Russia, forests are among the planet’s most biologically diverse and valuable places. The World Wildlife Fund, which estimates that we are losing dozens of football fields of forest per minute , describes deforestation as “ the biggest threat to biodiversity and climatic stability .” Conducting a forest inventory is currently laborious work. “They’re literally sending guys out to the woods with paper and pencil,” says SilviaTerra cofounder Max Uhlenhuth. “They’ll go measure, in a 10-acre area, the sizes and species of trees they have; you have to do a lot of random samples to make sure you cover all that variance.” Uhlenhuth and cofounder Zack Parisa, who came up with the idea for the startup when he was a graduate student at Yale’s forestry school, have two products that promise to update current methods. The first, called TimberScout (also available in a free version called Plot Reduce ), is software that detects forest changes by analyzing satellite imagery, which can usually be obtained through a contracting service. The tool measures variation using machine learning algorithms and customized software. SilviaTerra’s second product, PlotHound , is a free Android and iOS app that helps professional foresters keep track of forest inventory. Information recorded during a plot survey is automatically uploaded, and the app can tell the forester where to go to measure the most critical trees to get an accurate picture of the overall plot. The app is currently used by several thousand foresters across the United States, and SilviaTerra uses the collected information to improve its algorithms. “As we collect more information and build a data library, then by updating the remotely sensed imagery, we’ll have [complete] coverage of the U.S.,” says Parisa, who is SilviaTerra’s CEO. Alex Finkral , senior forester at the Forestland Group , the fifth-largest forestry company in the United States, believes that the technology will be the “a big step for estimating the quantity of trees and value of trees.” The Forestland Group is using SilviaTerra in a pilot program that will compare its technology with traditional techniques. Large landowners with forests, Finkral says, have a constantly shifting schedule of inventories, and updating inventory estimates is expensive. “With tens and hundreds of thousands of acres, you don’t need to send an army of people to sample,” he says. Cataloguing forests is useful for a range of purposes. Earlier in 2013, SilviaTerra started work with a conservation group with land near Mount Kenya to assess how reforestation efforts in communities across a million acres have affected conservation efforts focusing on five animal species. Parisa says his original inspiration came when he tried to inventory Armenia’s national forests and began wondering how he’d evaluate biodiversity in Peru. Ultimately, he hopes that the forest information collected by SilviaTerra can inform policy debates about issues like the feasibility of carbon markets or how to maximize deer populations for hunting. In fact, with satellites, software, smartphones, iPads, and apps, he’ll be counting on it. Continue reading
UK Forestry Returns On Fire
15 May 2013 by Andrew Shirley Posted in Farmland Market Commercial forests showed an average total return of just over 18% in 2012, according to the latest results from the IPD UK Forestry Index. Launched yesterday (14 May 2013), the latest instalment of the index, which has been running for 20 years, reveals that last year forestry comfortably outperformed most mainstream asset classes including equities (10.2%) and gilts (4.7%). On an annualised basis, forestry has delivered a return of 8.1% over the past two decades. This compares with 7.2% for equities and 7.7% for gilts. Many consider forestry to be a useful hedge for investment portfolios because of its limited correlation with more conventional asset classes. The three-year (23.9%), five-year (17.7%) and 10-year (16.3%) annualised returns appear to support this sentiment. Over the same periods, equities only managed to produce returns of 6.7%, 2.1% and 8.0%, respectively. Although this looks a strong performance, calculating the annual income return from the asset class is slightly more complicated, as IPD’s Mark Weedon explained to me and other slightly bemused launch attendees. Even though the value of timber sold last year accounted for 3.3% of the value of the 148 upland, mainly Sitka spruce, plantations – worth in total £221m and on average £2016/acre – tracked by the IPD Index, the calculated income return was actually -0.9%. This means the index’s performance is entirely down to capital appreciation. Mark said this seeming disparity is down to the unique nature of forestry investments. Even though felling and selling trees can produce a significant, if irregular, cash flow, the removal of the timber is, in effect, reducing the value of the plantations, hence the negative performance. While some investors may struggle slightly with this concept, the taxation benefits of owning commercial forestry are more clear cut. Income from timber sales is free of income and corporation tax, growing timber is exempt from Capital Gains tax and commercial woodland qualifies for 100% Business Property Relief after two years of ownership. The future outlook for forestry as an investment remains strong, according to the industry experts at the launch. There has been huge investment in timber processing facilities in the UK meaning more useful product can be extracted from each log. Demand for wood by the fast-growing biomass renewable energy sector has also doubled over the past two years. The ongoing weakness of Stirling also helps the export market. My colleague Tom Raynham, who advises funds and wealthy individuals looking to invest in farmland and forestry, says he has seen a rise in the demand for woodland as a long-term investment. “Like farmland, it is seen as a “safe-haven” investment that can offer not only significant tax advantages, but also lifestyle and amenity benefits. This makes forestry of particular interest to individuals and family offices. Knight Frank is currently selling a large block of woodland in south-west England that could appeal to investors.” Continue reading
