Ecosystem Monitoring

International stakeholders increasingly invest in offsetting carbon emissions, for example, via issuing Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) to forest conservation projects. Issuing trusted payments requires a transparent monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) process of the ecosystem services (e.g., carbon stored in forests) which is tedious. However, current methods for monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) of the landowner-provided forest ecosystem services are based on-ground inspection, which is slow and expensive (~300 USD/ha). Machine learning has the potential to scale and democratize ecosystem monitoring.