Contributed by Ash Baker, Program Manager at Yale Planetary Solutions
Seemingly a world away from Yale’s campus, a gravel road leads through dense, green woods, passes a pond covered in lily pads, and finally opens to a rustic, red-painted camp with cabins dotting the periphery. The temperature at Great Mountain Forest, located in Connecticut’s Northern Litchfield County, is about 10 degrees cooler than in New Haven. On a day of record-breaking heat in June, that was plenty hot enough. An especially fitting day to be in a workshop, run by Yale’s Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI), addressing carbon accounting and forest conservation amid a climate change-fueled streak of extreme hot weather.
Setting up for the day.
Among the first to arrive, I helped prepare for the day’s gathering, setting up box fans and opening windows in the un-air-conditioned camp classroom. Workshop participants trickled in, grabbing breakfast prepared by the camp’s chef, and gathering at a long wooden table in the adjacent rustic dining area.
Tropical landscapes––among the most biodiverse and ecologically significant regions on Earth–– are severely threatened by deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and climate change. ELTI trains and supports people from all sectors and backgrounds to restore and conserve these rich landscapes, drawing upon multidisciplinary science, traditional knowledge, and locally informed practices. Their Tropical Forest Landscapes (TFL) Certificate Program reaches students in more than 70 countries, making it critical that they identify and raise awareness about technologies that can be used in diverse contexts. There is also a gap in reliable measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification––and therefore funding––for forest conservation and carbon credit projects.
How could this team, with all its expertise, best assist people worldwide endeavoring to more accurately measure and report on carbon stocks? How could they inform students of the best emerging technologies to use based on their unique resources and context?
To answer these questions, the ELTI team proposed a workshop, Integrating Forest and Carbon Monitoring and Training in Tropical Landscape Conservation and Restoration Projects, which was accepted for funding during the 2024 YPS Grant Program cycle.
“The Great Mountain Forest is relatively remote with little or no internet or cell service, just like where many people who are working in these environments will experience,” said Emi Nicholson, ELTI’s Online Training Associate, as she and Gillian Bloomfield, ELTI’s Associate Director of Online Programs, kicked off the day. “And the technologies have to be affordable and accessible. Can we identify options that meet these restrictions?”
A series of guest speakers offered a wealth of possibilities based on their field experience and, in some cases, their past participation in the TFL program.
Soheil Salehian, founder of Understory Labs, was one of these past TFL certificate participants, and kicked off the workshop’s guest presentations.
“Millions of dollars are spent on forest monitoring systems that often fall short of delivering reliable action and data,” said Soheil. “It’s not just about scale; it’s about working across all scales well.”
Understory Labs’ operational principles center local context and learning from people who know the forests best. They combine their community-first approach with volumetric data collection paired with wood density based on species to arrive at a more accurate carbon estimate.
According to the National Ocean Service, Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, is a remote sensing method that uses lasers to generate precise, three-dimensional information. Understory Labs has developed a LiDAR system that can be worn as a backpack, which Soheil described as “Google Street View for conservation.”
Soheil walks through the forest with the LiDAR backpack in action.
The workshop participants headed out into the forest to see the backpack in action, soaking up the relative coolness in the shade tinted green by so many trees.
As Soheil walked around the forest, collecting data live, Star Childs, YSE alum ‘80 and founding member of the not-for-profit Great Mountain Forest Corporation, spoke about the history of the forest, how it’s been used for decades to train young people in forest management, and its connection to Yale.
Soon after, the group gathered again. This time in the lawn near the campsite. Jacob Peters, a Ph.D. student at the Yale School of the Environment, presented on monitoring forests with UAVs, better known as drones. He inputted a short program into a drone, and the group watched it take off straight into the air, becoming just a dot. It quickly followed the route Peters had given it, taking snapshots of the land below.
“I started out by wondering what vines were doing way up in the canopy,” said Peters. That began a journey of exploring many kinds of drone-gathered data from forests. He shared pros and cons of data collection strategies, from regular “cell phone” RGB images to acoustic to LiDAR.
Workshop participants Nathalia Potter and Bela Starinchak, research associates at YSE, watch Jacob Peters conduct a test flight with the drone before the workshop began.
Trying to escape the heat, participants watch the drone take flight from the shade of the camp classroom.
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After lunch, the heat climbed. Shades were lowered. Fans adjusted. And the afternoon sessions began.
“Seventy-five percent of lands are degraded, and we risk this becoming 90% by 2050,” said Alexander Godfrey, the director of impact and monitoring at Natural State. “There is a $700 billion funding gap in conserving biodiversity.”
Established in 2022 in Kenya, Natural State, with its team of conservationists, Indigenous scientists, engineers, and roboticists, is offering nature-based solutions in local environments in eastern Africa. They work to increase flow of funds to nature restoration, improve impact monitoring, provide educational resources.
Godfrey covered several tactics that Natural State has introduced: development of “nature credits” that incorporate carbon, biodiversity, and human well-being; carbon monitoring guidance adapted to non-forest biomes (like savannahs); and data collection protocols adapted to local custodians that are scalable, cost-effective, and intuitive with the goal of “democratizing access to science and knowledge historically restricted to the global north.”
As a young person in Kenya, Ceciliah Mumbi saw how black rhino populations were threatened, and her observations grew into a passion for conservation. Now a spatial data officer with Natural State, she introduced the uKweli Impact Portal, a system for collecting, managing, and visualizing field data.
“Conservation begins with connection, with people, with places, with science, with stories,” said Ceciliah. “But without quality, verifiable, and affordable impact data, local nature custodians can’t access finance.”
Their platform uses a suite of tools combined with AI to progress and review data from bronze level (raw data) through silver and finally gold (refined and aggregated data) that can be shared in reports for 3rd party verification.
Group photo in the Great Mountain Forest.
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While some of the workshop participants spent the night at camp for a second day of knowledge exchange, I returned to New Haven, where the temperature had soared over 100 degrees.
Day 2 of the workshop was held back on Yale’s campus, where Soheil and Jacob presented the data collected from their LiDAR backpack and drone demonstrations. These presentations engaged participants in analyzing data collected in the field using these technologies. Luke Browne, an associate research scientist at YSE, led a group discussion and brainstorm session on accessible aerial mapping resources, while Natural State and the Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions continued to lead discussions about carbon monitoring.
Having spent the entire first day in the un-air-conditioned cabin, I was immensely grateful to return to my climate-controlled apartment. But, of course, the vast majority of people globally aren’t so fortunate. The Great Mountain Forest served as a living laboratory for attendees to practice using the new techniques for monitoring and to evaluate how ELTI could scale up training on the use of these monitoring tools.
Through this grant, the Yale community and ELTI’s network of environmental practitioners were empowered to come together to learn how to protect our most precious landscapes. This mission requires consistent work toward equitable solutions, a focus on empowerment versus extraction, and opportunities for practical experimentation with ever-evolving technology. Workshops like this are critical for understanding how those in high- and -low-tech environments can protect their resources for their community’s prosperity––now and in the future.