Artificial Intelligence and Forest Management
How Can We Make the World More Green and Lush With the Help of AI?
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This article is co-written together with Syed Nazmus Sadat who Studies Forestry and Environmental Science at Shahjalal University of Science & Technology, Sylhet in Bangladesh.
How can artificial intelligence help in efforts to prevent deforestation? Deforestation has an incredibly adverse impact on planet earth. The forests cover close to a third of the land area on our planet and provide us with purer air and fresher water. Eighty percent of the world’s land based wildlife live in forests [1]. We should of course not need to argue for why forests are important yet it seems we have to. Between 1990 and 2016, the world lost 502,000 square miles (1.3 million square kilometers) of forest, according to the World Bank [2]. With the recent events of increasing forest fires in the Amazon protecting our forests across the world has again grown in relevance [3]. So let us touch upon the current issue of deforestation and then discuss how artificial intelligence can contribute to solutions that assist in solving this wicked problem. Artificial Intelligence can of course only be part of a coordinated effort, yet it has to be duly considered in addressing this issue.
Let’s Talk Deforestation
Numbers are not looking great for our forests. The Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA), coordinated by FAO, found that the world’s forest area decreased from 31.6 percent of the global land area to 30.6 percent between 1990 and 2015, but that the pace of loss has slowed in recent years [4]. So amongst this devestating message there is the respite of possibility to prevent further damage or even reverse the trend completely. Another source however estimates that up to 420 million acres of forest could be lost between 2010 and 2030 in these “deforestation fronts” if current trends continue [5].
If we go further back It said that the number of trees worldwide has fallen 46 percent since the dawn of agriculture 12,000 years ago and more than 15 billion trees are felled every…
