Forestry has a long-standing perception of being a pretty low-tech, primitive industry — after all, they just “chop trees and sell the wood.”

While the business at the core is exactly as simple as that, a big fat element of detail we often forget is that when you have to manage millions of hectares of wild forest land as a company, the challenge is anything but simple!

This episode is about how AI is changing forest inventories and carbon monitoring.

My guest is Rolf Schmitz, CEO of Collective Crunch: a company that provides data analytics solutions to forestry companies. They have spent the last 5 years building an extensive suite of ML products and have customers all over the Nordics.

This is The Age of AI Series, where we talk to the foremost entrepreneurs and innovators around the planet using AI to transform their industries.

Rolf and I get into the weeds (pun intended) of forestry and carbon economics, and give you the full picture:

01:45 — What’s going on in the forestry industry, and the concept of “forest inventory”
05:57 — How forest yields and inventory are measured
09:32 — Conventional methods of taking inventory of a forest, their error rates, pros and cons
13:47 — How new data can improve the error rates of conventional methods
16:13 — Brief history of LiDAR and machine learning methods in forestry — and the key factors affecting adoption rates
22:12 — Why building tech products for an un-sexy industry like forestry has suddenly started gathering more attention recently
24:54 — What makes one forest more “sustainable” than another, and why businesses are finally paying more attention
31:05 — What Collective Crunch provides to their customers and how it works
35:55 — The evolution of Collective Crunch; why they chose their current business model (big strategic decisions and reasoning for them)
40:34 — The key technical challenges in building Collective Crunch, explained simply

Here's the blog post for this episode: https://sanpram.com/2021/10/03/ai-for-forestry-collective-crunch/

This podcast is produced by Sanpram Transnational Corp., an education and media company helping non-technical professionals be tech-fluent. See our programs: https://sanpram.com/teaching/

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