ACEMS welcomed Climate Friendly, a spin-out from ACEMS Partner Organisation CSIRO, as a new Industry Affiliate Member in 2021.

Climate Friendly and ACEMS co-funded a collaborative project entitled “Tree detection bias in Australian landscapes”, with ACEMS Industry Collaboration Support Scheme funding. The research team included ACEMS CI Scott Sisson, ACEMS AI Yanan Fan and Climate Friendly’s Andrew O'Reilly-Nugent and Gregor Sanders.

This project aimed to improve Climate Friendly’s tree identification capabilities and processes to inform its carbon accounting practices for its carbon farming business. Existing algorithms and methods were not originally developed for identifying trees in Australian landscapes and it was not understood whether these methods would be fit-for-purpose in this context.

Studying the limitations of existing approaches and developing new techniques for identifying trees in the Australian environment was investigated by the research team. This included new techniques to identify individual trees from high resolution aerial imagery and LIDAR, across Australian landscapes, to help determine their carbon content.

A literature review was also completed, and a range of existing methods and algorithms were investigated on Climate Friendly datasets to better understand their capabilities, biases, and limitations in the Australian context. To address identified limitations, some new models have been developed for improved tree identification in the Australian context where canopy structure is less uniform, and forests are exposed to extreme environmental conditions.

In addition to the new models being finalised, the researchers plan to submit a journal review article, incorporating and extending on the literature review conducted as part of the project. It will review existing tree detection algorithms and data fusion techniques marrying multi-modal remote sensing data at massive scales, particularly focusing on methods that leverage high-resolution local data (e.g. aerial imagery and LIDAR) to inform general and scalable solutions that can be applied across entire landscapes.

By partnering with Climate Friendly to improve tree identification for carbon accounting, ACEMS is helping Climate Friendly to accelerate and scale its already significant positive environmental impacts through the fostering of sustainable, regenerative land management practices Australia-wide.

Following this beneficial collaboration, Climate Friendly and ACEMS members aim to extend their collaborations via an Industrial Transformation Training Centre bid and jointly pursuing applications with local government agencies to continue their work.

This collaboration, and future work, helps to realise a positive environmental impact via Climate Friendly’s partnerships with farmers, foresters, and traditional custodians, to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions and regenerate the landscape through improved carbon farming.

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