Seeing the trees 🌳🌴🌲 for the forest

Restor is developing cutting-edge AI models that use drone and satellite images to count trees, measure forest cover, and estimate forest diversity. But we need your help to refine and improve these models! Join our citizen science campaign to tag trees and support the protection and restoration of forests around the globe. It’s easy, and whether you spend 5 minutes or 5 hours, every tree tagged helps! 🌳🌴🌲

But wait, isn’t restoration about so much more than individual trees? Yes! Successful restoration efforts are about entire systems: bringing back healthy ecosystems such as forests, building holistic farming systems like agroforestry, and reimagining our cities with systems of urban greenways. The research is clear: if we only think about trees, we miss the bigger ecological, social, and economic picture.

So why are we counting trees? Over and over, we hear that monitoring early-stage restoration projects is a key challenge. A proliferation of new technologies - drones, phone apps, bioacoustic sensors, and more - offers an exciting opportunity to measure progress. However, processing data and making sense of the results is technically challenging and time-consuming. We asked ourselves: how can we help?

We decided to start with using AI to detect and count trees from drone images. Drones are getting cheaper and more accessible, and if we succeed with drone images, it’s a stepping stone to building models with satellite imagery, which is available for every place on Earth, opening up HUGE possibilities to scale the technology.

Restoring forests holds enormous potential to combat climate change, prevent biodiversity loss, and improve the well-being of communities. Trees are not a silver bullet. But they are a critical building block. So put your citizen science hat on and join this global research effort today!