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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
Little Progress Made On Defined Benefit Pension Deficits
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1efb8178-dbef-11e2-8853-00144feab7de.html#ixzz2XEbfdZZ1 By Josephine Cumbo The UK’s biggest companies have made little progress in cutting pension deficits, prompting calls for them to find new ways of reducing scheme liabilities. Research by PwC, the professional services group, found that FTSE 350 companies’ ability to support their defined benefit, or final salary, pension scheme promises remained far below that of 2007, before the recession. A PwC index, which tracks the overall level of support provided to defined benefit schemes out of a possible score of 100, now stood at 75, only a one-point improvement since June 2012. The current level of 75 was well below the 88 achieved pre-recession, said PwC. If a level of more than 90 is achieved over the longer term, this would indicate that companies’ legacy defined benefit pension issues were under more control. “Companies sponsoring DB pension schemes need to work harder to find returns in this new economic environment,” said Jeremy May, pensions partner at PwC. “This includes looking to non-traditional asset classes to achieve the required return, while meeting the schemes’ cash requirements over an appropriate timeframe. “Companies also need to be prepared to explore a wider range of ideas, such as longevity hedging, asset swapping and cash flow buy-ins to meet the schemes’ needs.” Pension scheme sponsors were not making the most of the flexibility in assessing funding status and setting recovery plans, “meaning that often too much money is tied up in overly prudent assessments of deficits”, added PwC. The analysis comes two months after the Pension Protection Fund gave its clearest signal yet to trustees to take a more lenient approach with companies struggling to plug their deficits. In its annual guidance, the PPF, which pays the pensions of defined benefit scheme members when their employer has gone bust, said that, where there are significant affordability issues, trustees may need to consider whether it is appropriate to agree lower contributions. This may also include a longer recovery plan, it said. The analysis comes as private sector schemes are starting to benefit from an upturn in the value of assets that underpin pension scheme funding. Last month, the combined deficit for 6,316 private sector schemes fell by £71bn to £185.5bn at the end of May 2013, largely due to a rise in gilt yields. Pension scheme deficits soared to record highs last year as a result of falling gilt yields, driven down by the Bank of England’s quantitative easing policy. Continue reading
Crop Crisis: Why Global Grain Demand Will Outstrip Supply
To meet global demand, grain production needs to double by 2050. It’s not going to make it. International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center Since the time of Malthus, humanity has worried whether there would be enough food to feed the growing population. Such fears were always overcome and doomsayers all proven wrong: there was always more land to grow our crops when existing croplands failed to deliver, and new ways to get more yield from old crops. Today our planet appears very finite, and the only places to expand agriculture are in our remnant natural grasslands and tropical forests. And the demand for more agricultural crops is relentless, due to not only our rising population, but more importantly, our rising prosperity. The expected 4 billion new members of the middle class who will join the rest of us by 2050 will likely demand more dairy and meat. These require an enormous amount of grains to produce. Add to these the demands biofuel places on agriculture, and we need to boost global agricultural production by 60% to 110% by 2050. To put this challenge in a time perspective, that kind of increase took our ancestors 10,000 years to achieve. So how are we doing? My research team recently published an analysis in PLOS ONE of the local to global scale performance of maize, rice, wheat and soybeans. These are the top four global crops, collectively responsible for nearly two-thirds of all agricultural calorie production. We found that current rates of productivity improvements are nowhere near the rates of productivity gains (2.4% per year) required for growing demand. Instead of the required doubling of crop production by 2050, at this rate the yield increase will be only 38% to 67%, with the problem more acute for rice and wheat. Australia, is the ninth largest global producer of wheat and a major exporter. Its wheat yields have declined at 0.7% per year. In fact, we observed negative yield trends in around 80% of Australia’s wheat cropland areas. Productivity was rising in only a few of the important wheat cropland areas: the South Eastern statistical division in New South Wales; Darling Downs in Queensland; Goulburn, Western district and Central Highlands in Victoria; south eastern region in Western Australia; and outer Adelaide, Murray Lands, and Eyre in South Australia. Even in these regions the rates of wheat productivity improvements were below the 2.4% rate required to double wheat production, except for south eastern region of New South Wales, where we estimated the rate to be 3.4% per year. Does this mean Australians won’t be able to feed themselves, much less feed others, with wheat? It seems very unlikely at only 0.7% per yearly declines. This decline however may worsen as Australian agriculture matures. Australian wheat yields are limited by lack of nutrients and of water, with the latter being a bigger factor as we reported in a paper published in Nature last year. In some areas of Australia wheat productivity was already at the maximum possible value. Looking beyond Australia, we found many countries where the gains in crop productivity are less than those required to keep pace with their population growth. In several countries – such as Guatemala and Kenya – productivity of maize, a significant source of daily dietary energy, is declining and population is growing. In Indonesia – the third largest rice-producing nation on Earth where rice provides about 49% of daily dietary energy – productivity gain is too low to keep pace with population growth. In India, China, Philippines and Nepal, productivity improvement rates in rice are just about enough to maintain per capita production at current levels. Although supply will not meet demand by 2050, all is not lost. We can close the demand–supply gap in one of many ways. We can invest more to boost crop productivity in the faltering regions that we identified. We can bring more of our remaining natural lands under production (but wheat alone would require 95 million additional hectares, more than the total area of New South Wales). We can reduce food waste, which already accounts for nearly half of global crop production (unfortunately, waste sometimes is difficult and expensive to reduce, as in developing nations where it occurs between farm and table due to lack of storage and transportation). Perhaps most controversially, we can change to more plant-based diets. Nobody really knows what members of the new middle class will choose to eat. History shows time and again that as people join the middle class, they look for more dairy and meat. But if they go against previous trends and decide to keep consumption of animal products low – if those of us already in the middle class reduce our meat consumption – we may all have enough to eat after all. 20 June 2013 Continue reading
