A SCOTTISH technology firm has won a £14.2 million contract to help developing countries manage and protect around 300 million hectares of tropical forests.
Edinburgh-based Ecometrica has secured the award from the UK Space Agency’s International Partnership Programme (IPP).
The project, which will run over three years, will see the firm’s software used to process, interpret and manage the vast volumes of data being transmitted from satellites already circling the Earth.
Dr Richard Tipper, executive chairman of Ecometrica, said: “We all know how important tropical rainforests are to the survival of the global ecosystem, but most people are only just waking up to the fact that we need to use technology to make sure conservation efforts are effective and properly directed.”
The Forests 2020 project is aimed at helping six countries – Brazil, Colombia, Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya and Mexico – to protect and restore their forests, which cover an area around 12 times the size of the UK.
It will see Ecometrica set up systems to process the data produced by commercial satellites and those of the European Space Agency and Nasa.
The company’s input is expected to significantly speed up the interpretation of that information, enabling them to produce maps and data about specific areas of forestry for the countries in question. The project will also see Ecometrica, which specialises in measuring environmental change, lead an international consortium that brings together many of the world’s leading experts on forest monitoring, including scientists from the Universities of Edinburgh and Leicester, plus forest authorities and researchers in partner countries.
Tipper said it can be hard for governments to obtain information about the scale of deforestation and forest degradation, particularly in large rural areas.
Ecometrica, which currently has 32 staff across bases in the Scottish capital, London, Boston, and Montreal, said the project is due to be completed by March 2020.
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