How drone technology is protecting Madagascar's vulnerable forests

Madagascar is an amazing country, it's super biodiverse and like 80% of the plant or animal species that are there are only found there, they're not found anywhere else on earth. But also Madagascar is the poorest non-war torn country in the world, meaning that there's real threats to the natural environment because that's where the pressure is to provide everything from food to fuel. 90% of the population of Madagascar rely on charcoal as their main fuel source, so that's putting a huge pressure on the forest to provide kind of just that level of fuel. So I've been working in Madagascar for about 20 years now and I generally work with drones and flying in anything really that's got a spatial context. Drones are really useful because we can fly them when we want, where we want, we can fly them underneath cloud cover which you don't get from satellite imagery and we can go to areas and fly them in places where we can never get to on ground. They're also very high resolution imagery which is not only super stunning to look at but it's very very useful, we can build 3D models from it and we can get extract height so it looks pretty, it's very scientifically great for us and we can get easy data from it as a quick win. With my research I wanted to focus on looking at deforestation metrics, looking at how we can assess what the losses actually are for this area and potentially how we can roll it into kind of account for what carbon might be lost in this process. When we're flying the drones you notice that there's two really unique things about the imagery that we're collecting. One, there were so many holes in the forest that it looked like a Swiss cheese, so when you normally look at a forest and you see the front of it it looks really nice and intact and that's what everybody would see. When you fly over it you see that actually this forest isn't intact at all, it's been completely compromised by the amount of holes that you've got in there. The other thing was in some of those holes we had trees that were completely felled, so they'd been cut down, they've been left lying there and that's really unique because in this area it's forest fuel, it's construction material, it's a really really valuable source so the fact that there were about 18 patches that were like this meant that this has happened really recently and also it gave us the unique ability, well for me to think about how can I measure this, I can actually see them with the drone imagery, I can actually measure these directly and that was pretty unique. So I'm looking at where it's happening, trying to account for what's going on. I also then want to use drones and I'm going to be using them in the north of Madagascar to look at restoration. We've got trial plots there of growing our seeds in and the drone technology, frequent flights enables us to see on a timely basis how things are growing back and whether or if we can even assess how much carbon might be stored on those new things. So that's kind of a positive way of looking at it but then bad things happen, we lose the forest, fires for example, that's why we're doing a lot of the restoration. So if a fire is happening can we do an early warning alert in the south, can we go and see deforestation, can we go and send out the patrols to go and try and stop that kind of thing. We can look at things that after the fact as well, we can assess what's actually happened, how severe or how bad things are and if we want to actually go through and either help or monitor or put changes in place, where those best place to do that. We were talking to the communities about what was important to them and they said that NGOs or researchers or people doing forestry or restoration come to the forest but they're only interested in the trees and they're not interested in the people at all and that for me that was really really heartbreaking because they are the heart of the forest, they are the reason that we're doing what we're doing and I really kind of took that to heart and our project is based on providing for them and for them to have a sustainable future. We're providing yams for them to grow to protect the forest from illegal collection so they can eat that in the hungry season and also they are running the nurseries from which we will be getting our trees and seedlings so they have a livelihood, they have two sets of livelihoods that they can take forward. When the project finishes they are running that, we are not paying them to do it, we will buy the seedlings but they are running this themselves. It's a real big hope for the future of Madagascar's forests.