Odyssey alumni team closes a three-year contract to protect forests on Borneo
An Odyssey Hackathon challenge has turned into a three-year partnership between the Netherlands-based space tech company Space4Good and Indonesia-based Arsari Enviro Industri. The companies are joining forces to unlock new opportunities of data-driven sustainable agroforestry to help restore, protect and manage 170.000 hectares of mixed tropical rainforest in Kalimantan.
Update June 23, 2020: note that the event formerly known as Odyssey Hackathon has been moved online and rebranded as Odyssey Momentum. More: https://www.odyssey.org/odyssey-hackathon-becomes-momentum/
In the 2019 edition of Odyssey Hackathon, Masarang Foundation, Prince Bernhard Nature Fund, and Ocean Protocol challenged the teams to co-create a digital infrastructure for regenerative ecosystems. Five teams were asked to showcase how emerging technologies can potentially scale the reforestation model developed by renowned biologist and rainforest engineer Willie Smits. Fast-forward a year after the hackathon: Space4Good and Arsari Enviro Industri, where Smits is a Chief Science Officer, have announced a three-year partnership.
Smits described his experience of the Odyssey hackathon in a blog post in May 2019: “I supervised five groups that had chosen the wildlife challenge and were all extremely knowledgeable, intelligent and experts in their I.T. fields. They kept me talking for about ten hours a day in order to understand more about environmental problems, how the field situation was, what facilities local people in Indonesia had, etc. and how they could help to find solutions to these problems.”
He also added: “One of the teams called “ReWild4Good” was extremely fast to make an application that directly retrieved all kinds of data about plant growing conditions around the world from existing online databases so that the plant species adapted to those locations could be selected to be included in the recipes. I was extremely impressed with their work. The ReWild4Good team in the end came out in second place. But I was so impressed by their work that I also hope to continue to work with them to support our large-scale Indonesian Rebuild reforestation program.”
“The thing that was most impressive about the hackathon was this connection with Willie. To be able to meet him and get inspired by him,” recounts now Alexander Gunkel, Founder at Space4Good (aka Rewild4Good at the Hackathon). Willie Smits has been studying rainforests for over 35 years and has devoted his life to saving the rainforest on Borneo. He has found a way to not only regrow the trees but also create a model for restoring fragile ecosystems. [Watch this TED video to find out more].
“Throughout his years of work and based on his contextual understanding, Willie developed reforestation “recipes” and our idea during the hackathon was to automate this recipe creation, like a Chef Watson for ecosystem restoration,” Gunkel explains. “A recipe describes which tree needs to be planted where, in which combination with other trees in order to achieve a particular objective. The objective can be, for instance, CO2 sequestration, creation of local jobs or protection of close-by coral reefs. Each of these objectives needs a combination of different trees. Willie wanted to create a recipe generator which he can use for his own organization but also has the potential to help other organizations active in the similar field. The vision would be that you simply type in the location you are interested in, which objective you want to achieve, and get the right recipe based on available big data sources, such as satellite imagery. During the hackathon, we were able to create a dashboard to show people how this could work eventually and actually tap into some of the resources Willie already created.”
Space4Good is a group of data-driven scientists, urban planners, geographic information experts, and remote sensing specialists. The company consults organizations on how to make use of novel satellite or drone insights and develops geoinformation applications to solve complex problems in the field of agriculture, renewable energy, disaster management and urban planning. Gunkel’s path in the space industry has started at the European Space Agency in Noordwijk. He then went on to build an impressive track record in social entrepreneurship and has focused on using space technology for social and environmental impact.
Gunkel: “I thought: let’s use our skills and connections from the space sector to do something good here on earth, for meaningful projects and inspiring customers. Our first client was actually an artist. He wanted a crowd-sourced information platform where users could document trees which have been or were about to be cut down by municipalities in order to protect them. We connected the platform with data about air quality and greenness index of the cities to provide additional contextual information which we derive from satellite imagery.”
Other ongoing projects from Space4Good include a damaged building detection for war-torn areas to help first responders on the ground decide where to focus their efforts first as well as environmental impact assessments for sustainable agriculture, forestry and urban developments.
The company’s newly acquired client Arsari applies innovative agroforestry solutions to both protect the biodiversity within its lands while running an economically profitable business. Their “Rebuild Program” centred in Kalimantan, Borneo, comprises an area of more than 170.000 hectares. 70% of this land is made up of rainforest severely degraded by fires, which Arsari is rebuilding through implementing a multi-species reforestation approach designed by Willie Smits.
“What we are doing is we create a new forest which has a higher biomass than the shrub forest that is now dying here,” commented Smits, whose knowledge is at the heart of the program. A combined planting system he developed allows to optimally capture sunlight, nutrients, and water to grow a variety of products and provides job opportunities, income, food, and a biomass supply over time.
Several species combined by Smits in the area help each other and grow in perfect harmony: sugar palm, cassava, legumes, figs and timber species create a self-sustaining forest system which continues to deliver a variety of products over the years, among which starch, animal feed, fibre, fruit, timber and sugary juice, biocoal and many other products. Space4Good will further contribute to this reforestation model with data obtained from satellites and drones.
Gunkel: “Arsari is working on a system to combine profit with sustainability, but in order to do so, they need a management and monitoring tool which can tell them whether they are really achieving these objectives: both the impact and the profit. That’s where we proposed the Reforester Platform. It assesses the available biomass and how it’s developing over time and combines this data with information about flooding, water reservoirs, illegal logging activities and many more factors, which we’re trying to monitor and warn Arsari about with the help of satellite and drone imagery.”
Although combining two information sources is not a new concept, it has not yet been done in such a complex ecosystem, according to Gunkel.
“In the context of agroforestry in mixed tropical areas, it’s both very novel and innovative. Satellites are globally available and have a reliable update frequency but the resolution is not very good. You cannot look at one single tree. You can only look at the forest as a whole. With drones, it’s the other way around. The resolution is great but usually, it’s really expensive to fly them regularly and the data volume is an issue when using novel LIDAR instruments. We are going to try and find this perfect balance of what you can do with satellites and drones. Accordingly, we will complement wide satellite scans of biomass with insights from drone flights, the best of both worlds. Arsari’s territory is the perfect training and development ground while the Reforester will be built to scale to other areas as well.”
“The idea is very visionary and we are honoured to tackle it with Willie and Arsari. It requires a lot of research and investigation as well as the collaboration with leading partners. The idea of the Reforester and The Rebuild Program as a whole is that it should work not only on one territory but can be applied for other mixed agroforestry land owners and operators who have the same vision of creating something sustainable alongside profit, which is a definition of social enterprises. As a part of The Rebuild Program, other companies should have access to this monitoring tool, too.”
The solution is now being developed.
Odyssey thanks Prince Bernhard Nature Fund for enabling the Track “Scaling Wildlife Protection” of Odyssey Hackathon 2020.
About Odyssey
Odyssey connects governmental, corporate, and nonprofit partners with innovative ideas to collaboratively address complex 21st-century challenges. We mobilize a global ecosystem of more than 6,000 members, among whom developers, creatives, startups, corporates, investors, governmental bodies, legal experts, regulators, scientists, and other key stakeholders. The past three physical editions of the event known as “Odyssey Hackathon” have drawn thousands of participants from around the world to Groningen, the Netherlands. The next edition, rebranded as Odyssey Momentum, explores the internet’s potential to unlock new levels of online collaboration and next-gen event experiences.
