Internet of Nature Podcast

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Jad Daley, the 40th president and CEO of American Forests, the oldest forest conservation organization in the states, to discuss the unprecedented $1.5 billion federal investment for the U.S. Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry Program, how the investment will give priority to projects that benefit underserved communities, address extreme heat, and low-canopy populations, and how Jad and the team at American Forests have estimated that the cash influx, combined with matching contributions from funding recipients, could create thousands of jobs and help plant and protect 40 to 50 million trees nationwide. At the end of the episode, we wrap up with Ian Hanou, the founder and CEO of PlanIT Geo, to reflect on what Season 5 has taught us and to discuss what it means for the future of urban forestry.

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Tom Ebeling, Community Arborist at Openlands, to discuss how we can ensure the trees that are planted today will still be there in 10, 20, 50, and 100 years' time, why urban tree mortality statistics are all over the map, and how Openlands' highly successful TreePlanters Grant and TreeKeeprs program may hold the secret to transforming tree-planting campaigns into tree-growing campaigns. 

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Vivek Shandas, Professor of Climate Adaptation at Portland State University and founder of CAPA Strategies, a global climate consulting firm, to discuss how urban forestry can revolutionize the way we think about promoting health and wellness, why it's different from the traditional "ecosystem service" model, and how it can appeal to non-traditional stakeholders, such as general physicians, health departments, educators, and the wider community.

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Alex Hancock, urban forestry consultant at PlanIT Geo, to discuss private tree ordinances, a hot regulatory topic as municipalities work to protect and manage trees on private land, how emerging technologies may offer new solutions, and the ethical line between using technology to help with management while also respecting citizens' rights.

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Dan Lambe, CEO at Arbor Day Foundation, to discuss Dan's start in trees and urban forestry, the history of Arbor Day and the Arbor Day Foundation, the world’s best urban forests, what we can learn from the most successful examples around the world, Dan's favorite urban forest, and how new forms of data and technology play a critical role in the protection of urban forests.

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Richard Louv, best known as the author of Last Child in the Woods, The Nature Principle, Our Wild Calling, and more, and founder of the Children and Nature Network, to discuss his 2005 bestseller that coined the phrase nature-deficit disorder, how his work sparked an international movement to examine the health benefits of spending time outdoors, why politics should keep its hands off nature, why rewilding cities is crucial to humanity’s future, why he’s not “anti-tech”, despite constantly being labeled as such, and why something special happens when we connect with wild animals.

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Max Lerner, director of the Emerging Technologies team at the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation and founder of GROW (Green Revitalization Outreach Workforce) Externships, to discuss his upbringing in New York City, how he cultivated his love for nature, his decades of experience developing green roofs and urban farms, how his passion for technology led him to establish NYC Parks’ Emerging Tech team, how it grew to a think tank of over a 100 scientific visionaries, and his commitment to educating the green professionals of the future through innovative externships abroad.

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Giulio Boccaletti, author, scientist, and co-founder of Chloris Geospatial, to discuss his unconventional career path, from physicist to climate scientist to McKinsey partner to The Nature Conservancy’s chief strategy officer to writing his new book, Water: A Biography, we discuss his views on using technology as a force for good, especially for resource management, if we should take up biodiversity in the constitution, the danger of making environmentalism political, and why humanity must fundamentally change its relationship with nature.

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Monica Olsen and Jennifer Walsh, creators of the Biophilic Solutions Podcast, to discuss what connecting to nature means to them, how biophilic design can unlock an alternative method of suburban development like the Serenbe community near Atlanta, Georgia, how the pandemic changed people’s relationship with the natural world, and the technologies working to connect people to nature that they’re most excited about.

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Dr. Robert Zarr, board-certified pediatrician, founder, and medical director of Park Rx America (PRA), to discuss how seeing Richard Louv speak on his book, Last Child in the Woods, changed the course of his medical practice, why and how he prescribes nature to his young patients and their families, how technology can make nature-rich areas accessible to all, and why spending time in and around nature is the single most important first step to improving both human and planetary health.

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Tim Beatley, Professor of Sustainable Communities at the University of Virginia and founder of “Biophilic Cities” to discuss why being in nature must be a daily, easy practice, his efforts to make every city in the world a “biophilic” one, fascinating stories of rewilding in cities, from the world’s largest urban bat colony in Austin to the world’s largest roost of swifts in a Portland elementary school, and how nature is all around us, if only we open our eyes.

This podcast episode was brought to you by The Nature Conservancy's global coalition — Nature4Climate.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Matthew Browning, founder of the Virtual Reality & Nature Lab at Clemson University, to discuss how growing up near nature shaped him, how working as a park ranger sparked an interest in academia, why he’s prioritizing nature exposure for his family, and recent research including how nature-based virtual reality is beneficial for people who cannot access the outdoors, why people who live in greener areas tend to have lower health care costs, and why deserts can be just as therapeutic as forests.

This podcast episode was brought to you by The Nature Conservancy's global coalition — Nature4Climate.

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Tim van Dam, co-founder and director of Smart Parks, to discuss how a chance encounter with a rhino sparked a career in wildlife conservation, the technologies he’s working on to arm park rangers in their fight against illegal poaching, how to prevent human-wildlife conflicts in cities and villages, anecdotes from his time in the field from collaring an elephant to tracking cats with Covid-19, how he stays motivated in the face of tragedy, and why he hopes his technology will soon be obsolete.

This podcast episode was brought to you by The Nature Conservancy's global coalition — Nature4Climate.

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Ben Wilinsky, Director of Partnerships and Innovation at the Arbor Day Foundation, to discuss how the Arbor Day Foundation is planting 500 million trees in five years to celebrate its 50th anniversary, how they’ll target their tree-planting efforts in neighborhoods and forests of greatest need, the role NatureQuant’s NatureScore™ data will play, why Ben is optimistic about greening communities, and which technologies he thinks will realize the Arbor Day Foundation’s mission to “inspire people to plant, nurture, and celebrate trees”.

This podcast episode was brought to you by The Nature Conservancy's global coalition — Nature4Climate.

Can nature and technology — long viewed as opposing forces — work together to stabilize our climate, sustain our urban environments, and benefit our health? Internet of Nature Podcast is on a mission to find out. Join me every Wednesday as I interview top CEOs & innovators on their technologies for building greener, healthier, and smarter communities. Each episode contains powerful stories behind the entrepreneur, delves into questions usually shied away from, and explores where the internet and nature converge.

Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Dr. Thomas Crowther, founder of Restor and the Crowther Lab at ETH Zürich to discuss why his early obsession with snakes sparked a fascination with ecology, why he struggled in school, how one professor changed the trajectory of his career, why publishing the notorious "trillion tree paper" was the "best and worst week" of his life, what he's learned about nuanced yet effective science communication, and how his Restor platform, the "Google Maps for Nature", will create transparency in global landscape restoration, making his life's vision — a reality.

This podcast episode was brought to you by The Nature Conservancy's global coalition — Nature4Climate.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Julietta Sorensen Kass, Founder of Our Nature, to discuss what a tree would say if it could talk, why people find it easier to open up to trees rather than other people, how text messaging can be used to promote human-nature relationships, the ins-and-outs of her viral Text-A-Tree initiative that saw 3,000 Haligonians send nearly 11,000 texts to 15 different trees, and the tree-texts that still bring her to tears.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Mark Bode and Willem de Feijter, Co-Founders of TreeCollective, to discuss what happens when you combine an urban forester and a business developer, why trees make an essential and valuable contribution to our dense cities, how blockchain technology and tokenization can register the value of trees, monitor their ROI, and help transfer “tree ownership”, and why trees need a business model, now more than ever.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Jared Hanley, co-founder and CEO of NatureQuant, to discuss why nature exposure makes people healthier, why living near nature could make you live longer, the patent-pending technology he developed to leverage nature's impact on public health, how he created "NatureScore", which rates nearby nature for any location and "NatureDose", a groundbreaking nature prescription app that monitors time inside, outside, and exposed to nature to improve health, and why two hours outside may be the new 10,000 steps.

3:21 - What is NatureQuant, who's behind it, and how did you come up with the idea?
4:52 - NatureQuant's vision
6:00 - How can doctors prescribe nature?
7:34 - What's the research on the benefits of nature on human health?
9:40 - How NatureQuant applies machine learning
10:55 - The link between living in nature-rich communities and Covid-19
14:50 - The entrepreneurial journey of NatureQuant
21:56 - The benefits of nature exposure on daily activities
26:38 - Does an increase in screen time affect us physiologically?
35:56 - Organisations that could be useful clients for NatureQuant
39:42 - How to connect with Jared
40:54 - What does the Internet of Nature mean to you?

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Clara Rowe, CEO of Restor, to discuss why ecosystem restoration and conservation are crucial for protecting Earth’s biodiversity and achieving climate mitigation goals, how restoration has the potential to draw down about 30 percent of accumulated global carbon emissions, why the biggest impacts are felt at the local scale, and why with the right data, along with full transparency, local restoration projects can now connect to the world's first open-source platform for global restoration action. Restor is founded by ETH Zurich’s Crowther Lab in collaboration with Google and was a finalist for the Royal Foundation’s 2021 Earthshot Prize and is an official partner of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Dr. Cecil Konijnendijk, co-founder of the Nature Based Solutions Institute, to discuss how he became one of the founders of the global urban forest movement, why he proposed the 3-30-300 rule to deliver clear criteria for the minimum provision of urban trees, and what he's learned after decades of working with international organizations such as the United Nations and governments in over 30 countries to develop and implement urban forestry programs.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Matthew Wells, Public Landscape Manager for the City of Santa Monica in Southern California, to discuss urban deforestation on public and private lands, why we're losing trees and the space to plant and grow new ones in cities, the differences between tree care in the USA and the UK, and Matt's frustration with the inherent lack of sustainability in the tree care industry.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Joe Glesta, CEO & Co-Founder of Senscity, to discuss building an urban climate intelligence platform to understand past, current, and future climate change risks, impacts, and performance, why Senscity is not (just) an IoT company, why there's room for every business in the fight to adapt to climate change, and why location-based climate intelligence and IoT-based sensing, can optimize the climate performance of green infrastructure.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Indra den Bakker, CEO & Co-Founder of Overstory, to discuss how his company applies machine learning to satellite imagery to reduce the risk of wildfires and power outages, how his work improves decision-making about the Earth's forests, why utility lines still cause so many wildfires and how AI-driven vegetation management can help, how he applies his love for AI to combat the impacts of climate change, and his advice for young nature-focused tech start-ups.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Alison Young, co-director of the Center for Biodiversity and Community Science at the California Academy of Sciences, to discuss why she co-founded the City Nature Challenge, how iNaturalist can help people find and document plants and wildlife in cities across the globe, and why technology can be an aid, rather than a distraction, to get people outdoors and provide the biodiversity data desperately needed by decision-makers.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Dr. Andrew Hirons, senior lecturer in Arboriculture at Myerscough College (UK), to discuss his career journey from tree climbing arborist to arboriculture lecturer, his passion for tree biology (and why we need it to save urban trees), and his work on using IoT sensor technologies, from soil moisture to sap flow, to better manage the urban forest.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Prof. Menno Schilthuizen, an evolutionary biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, bestselling author of Darwin Comes to Town, and co-founder and co-director of Taxon Expeditions, which trains citizen scientists to document biodiversity in some of the world’s most biodiverse places.  

We discuss how urban life is accelerating and changing the evolution of animals, plants, and insects, why citizen scientists are the key to documenting biodiversity on a global scale, how AI-powered apps can track urban evolution, and Menno's hope for the future of merging nature, ecology, and technology.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Dr. Payam Tabrizian, software design lead at IDEO, to discuss how virtual reality can help us understand how people feel safe (or unsafe) in various green space settings, the common misconceptions people have about green space, how immersive technology allows researchers to design a true experiment with controlled variables, and why, sometimes, leaving things as they are may be the best solution.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Ben Seamark and Tom Davey, founders of Forestree, a tree management software system built to help cities plan, manage and grow urban trees, to discuss their approach on fusing urban forestry with data science, why a lack of data has led officials (and citizens) to structurally undervalue urban forests, and how data can help make better planning decisions.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Puck van Dijk, a theatre director with a green heart, to discuss how she created the "Giants of North" (Reuzen van Noord) immersive geolocated audio tree tour, the gentrification and development issues facing Amsterdam North (and so many other cities), the real-life stories that inspired the tour's six "talking" trees, and the impact just six trees can have on a changing neighbourhood.  

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Tim Rademacher, a postdoctoral scholar of technology and trees, to discuss how he created the Witness Tree social media project at Harvard Forest, how a tweeting tree can help reconnect humans to nature, why forests carry more information than we currently make use of, and his hope for the future of climate communication.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Eric Ralls, Founder & CEO of PlantSnap and Earth.com, to discuss how a chance encounter with a mystery plant in his friend's backyard led to the idea behind PlantSnap, what technologies have made PlantSnap's 650,000 plants and 475 million+ image database possible, how a revolutionary partnership with the world's largest botanic gardens organization will complete their global citizen science project, and of course, what Eric's favourite plant is. 

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Fábio Duarte, Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Senseable City Lab, to discuss how we can take advantage of "opportunistic data", why urban ecology is often disregarded, how Google Street View imagery and computer vision led to the development of Treepedia, why urban biodiversity matters, how Diversitree came to be, and his biggest inspirations for a brighter urban future.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Marcel Steegh, Co-Founder & CTO at SoilMania, to discuss how his (tomato) farm roots, his ever-changing relationship with nature, his career in telecommunications, and how he found his new passion applying emerging IoT, sensor, and big data technologies to better monitor soil, the foundation of healthy crops, healthy animals, healthy people, and a healthy planet.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Yvonne Lynch, currently, Urban Greening & Climate Resilience Strategist at Green Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) and former head of the City of Melbourne (Australia) Urban Forest and Ecology team, to discuss how her (career) journey led her to green the desert in Riyadh, the story behind the viral "Email-a-tree" campaign she set up with her colleagues at the City of Melbourne, the emails that still bring her to tears, and much more.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Stine Kondrup, Founder & CEO at Intugreen, to discuss her wildly successful Danish app "World Safari", which takes young and old on Pokémon GO-like urban nature safaris, her transition from academia to entrepreneurship, her love of nature, the most common misconceptions she faces when applying emerging technologies to nature education and conservation, and much more.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Ian Hanou, Founder & CEO at PlanIT Geo, to discuss the history of remote sensing in urban forestry, how he got his start in the field, the gap he saw that led to the founding of PlanIT Geo and its popular tree mapping software suite (called Treeplotter), what urban foresters need to know about remote sensing, and how recent advancements in AI are driving the field forward faster than ever before.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Ash Welch, Senior Green Infrastructure and Biodiversity Specialist at AECOM, to explore his pioneering use of virtual reality and other immersive technologies for nature conservation and biophilic design, how virtual reality can act as an empathy machine, the most surprising reactions people have to VR, and why ecologists have been slow to adopt this promising new technology.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Joris Olde Rikkert, Founder & CEO of Treemendo, to discuss his studies in climate physics, his three (!) successful social enterprises, his want to create (even) more impact, the opportunity he saw to reconnect nature-deprived urban dwellers with reforestation programs, and much more. Treemendo is an online platform enabling organizations and individuals to transparently plant, monitor, and visit healthy forests.

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Dr. Nadina Galle is joined by Dr. Mike Edwards, Co-Founder and Chief Listening Officer at Sound Matters, to philosophize about how each landscape has a soundscape, the importance of listening to (and in) our noisy worlds, how sound can change our perspective, his exciting new projects in 2021, and much more.

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