Environmental protection is one of the basic prerequisites for the overall development of any country in the world. One of the most important challenges in environment protection is forest management for recreation and conservation. Feeding humanity, peoples’ health and well-being are closely associated with forests. All over the world, forests provide more than 86 million green jobs and support the livelihoods of people. Forests are home to most of Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity. Forests supply water, provide livelihoods, mitigate climate change and are essential for sustainable food production.
Yet the latest statistics towards deforestation are alarming. The area of primary forest worldwide has decreased by over 80 million hectares since 1990. More than 100 million hectares of forests are adversely affected by forest fires, pests, diseases, invasive species drought, illegal loggings and adverse weather events. Through the comprehensive researches, forest degradation is the second leading cause of global warming and a key issue for climate change.
Among many environmental challenges, forests fire is one of the main causes of deforestation. Most fires are caused by people, and very often they get out of control. Every year, wildfires burn millions of hectares of forests and other types of vegetation. A global analysis of forest area affected by fire between 2003 and 2012 identified approximately 67 million hectares burned annually. In 2015, around 98 million hectares of forest were affected by fires. These dramatic and high-profile wildfires in Australia, Brazil, Greece and the United States of America (California) in 2018 and 2019, caused great losses of human and animal lives, property and infrastructure as well as immense environmental and economic damage, both in terms of resources destroyed and the costs of suppression. Firefighters can do little to stop such fires until weather or fuel conditions change. According to “The State of the
World’s Forests 2020”, in the future, climate change is expected to bring longer fire seasons
and more-severe fires over much of the globe, including some areas where fire has not
previously been a common problem.
Another impact of deforestation is disappearing of different species without knowing reasons of their loss. Preserving nature is critical to human health. Loss of biodiversity in the forests and protection of its flora and fauna by studying and measuring risks is another challenging issue for modern scientists. In that sense, COVID-19 is a wake-up call for the humanity which was affected by the disease that comes from wild animals and inefficiency of nature. Poaching, illegal exploitation and illicit trade in timber and other forest resources are global phenomena that have serious implications for biodiversity protection, ecosystem services and national economies. They also have direct and indirect negative impacts on urban and rural communities that result from depleting the resource base on which these communities depend for their livelihoods and well-being.
Global disasters start from small problems, those become more severe, with respect to time and then problem becomes global challenge. Our main goal is to detect problem at the beginning, before it escalates. This process itself mitigates or eliminates financial, economic and ecological problems.
Market Segments and Explanation – Environment
Existing global environmental monitoring market worth $20 Billion. Mainly implemented by
satellite imagery and different kind of sensors, installed on locations. Also, by humans directly observing and taking samples. They use cars, boats, horses and quadricycles to reach predefined monitoring area. Actual monitoring system cannot guarantee timely detection of different kind of problems which requires immediate responses. We had several meetings with local environmental governmental and non-governmental organizations to discuss modern challenges in this field. It appeared that timely detection of problems is key solution in environment protection and conservation field.
Solution
Our approach is to make environmental monitoring more proactive and cover the huge
territories using high precious aerial monitoring. We developed drone technology which is
capable to autonomously take off and land without any runways or catapults, fly up to 24 hours and stream live data ground station.
We are going to develop unified software for our users, they will have opportunity to get live imagery and data through the application. For demonstrations there is a picture below of test model in Georgia, where four drones are capable to cover all over the territory and stream invaluable live data to interested parties.
Benefits and values
Compare to existing aerial monitoring, like satellite imagery, which provides low resolution
data, it’s only used for general evaluation of environment conditions. Our system is capable to provide high quality detailed imagery and increase monitoring efficiency 100 times.
Approaching the results, we are eliminating or mitigate aforementioned problems caused by lack of monitoring system.
We believe that our approach will become main instrument for governmental and non-profit organizations for monitoring and managing environments.
To avoid further deforestation, all of the aforementioned challenges need immediate
preventive actions, which will be guaranteed by using the permanent monitoring system.
There exist some online monitoring applications but full-scale 24-hour live aerial forest
monitoring is still unavailable.
In many countries, taking into consideration their climate and landscape complexity,
permanent forest monitoring can be inaccessible – lack of high technology unmanned aerial
vehicles (drones) make impossible to monitor forests everywhere during 24-hour.
Furthermore, without using drones we will not enhance our ability to detect and monitor
biodiversity. All of the above-mentioned deforestation challenges need swift respond in early stage. Non-existence of comprehensive 24-hour live monitoring mechanism is one of the causes of high rates of fires and generally, deforestation related problems. Ultimately, it
deprives people all over the World, including Georgia, from benefits of forest’s biodiversity,
hard-earned money and in long term, can lead to health problems.
Environmental protection is one of the basic prerequisites for the overall development of any country in the world.