🌴 Bioverse: Realizing the value of intact forests with technology for Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs)
TLDR; Bioverse is a forest data company using technology to improve the unit economics of healthy forests, starting with the Amazon.
The problem: Intact Tropical Forests hold a lot of economic value in the form of Non-Timber Forest Products.
But because the NTFP economy is limited in scale, this value is unrealized - leading to the loss of 27 football fields of forests every minute for deforestation-linked industries, like timber and livestock.
Even if the term “Non-Timber Forest Products” is unfamiliar to you, chances are you’ve come across a few of them before. Acai berries, Brazil nuts, and chicle, are all examples of “mega-tree” NTFPs, but there are many other lesser known NTFPs that provide immense nutritional and cultural values. Communities around the world rely on NTFPs for oils, medicines, fibres, and more.
If harvested responsibly and at stable enough volumes, NTFPs can not only provide forest-dwelling communities with sustenance and economic livelihoods - they can also provide more sustainable alternatives to commodities like palm and almond oil.
And most importantly, they incentivise communities to conserve the forests, as many of these species can only thrive within intact forests.
Unfortunately, however, harvesting them responsibly and with the security of stable volumes is easier said than done. Because many NTFPs are unevenly distributed, they are slow and labour-intensive to gather. Communities that want to sell NTFPs take on a lot of the upfront costs for their time, equipment, and transportation, but do not have the certainty of knowing what volumes they will come across to be able to eventually sell.
The solution: Bioverse uses technology to derisk NTFP supply chains and unlock the economic value of intact forests. Commodity buyers, carbon project developers, and other stakeholders can invest in local communities more meaningfully.
Bioverse has solved a number of critical pain points for communities and other NTFP economy stakeholders alike:
Firstly, Bioverse conducts a forest inventory analysis to locate NTFP clusters and densities, using drones to collect high resolution of the forest of interest. Not only do they do so extremely quickly and more cheaply than competitors, they have also been able to find 5-10x the number of trees of each species compared to what was previously known locally.
Next, they can coordinate harvests with on-ground communities, sharing data on optimal collection sites with the harvesters via the Bioverse app, and allowing them to also ground truth the models that they provide.
Pictured above, left: Point cloud generated from Bioverse’s forest mapping service, which can distinguish vegetation heights. Right: The results of Bioverse’s work at XPrize rainforest, where they mapped and processed the vegetation biodiversity data for a test site in Singapore within under 48 hours.
In this way, Bioverse has digitised the NTFP economy, enabling stable and reliable harvest volumes to derisk the entire supply chain.
Once the forest map exists, Bioverse can also build further layers of value, such as carbon and biodiversity estimates. In some cases, they have also triangulated NTFP density data with information on transportation infrastructure, community hubs, and more, to advise clients on optimal sites for investments into NTFP infrastructure, like storage and processing facilities.
Meet the team: Having bootstrapped this work and built a profitable company, the founders of Bioverse are looking to take the company to the next level.
Biodiversity Accelerator+: How have Bioverse’s products and services transformed some of the work your clients are undertaking?
Francisco D'Elia, CEO: One of our first and favorite clients came to us already knowing that NTFPs are valuable to their business, and with strong connections into the harvesters that gather these. While this client is a global company run in modern ways, the harvesters were operating without the benefit of digital technologies, in a way that limited their supply, their ability to coordinate and also their revenue.
To this situation of unmet demand and sub-optimal coordination, Bioverse brings a combination of digital tools that help realize the economic potential of the healthy, standing rainforest.
We increased the number of species the harvesters gathered from, and also the number of individual trees that were harvested. The result for our client is seeing a pathway to scaling up the NTFP industry across the Amazon so that its value could be 300x greater than it currently is.
Biodiversity Accelerator+: What is the hardest thing about your work?
Nathaniel Calhoun, Chief Strategy Officer: If the Amazon and other vulnerable forests could be protected by carbon credits, deforestation would already have stopped. If these forests could be protected by well meaning people looking at satellite data and interacting with global financial markets, deforestation would already have stopped.
We know that indigenous people and local communities need to be at the center of forest protection and restoration and we know that it takes great expertise to tell them something about their forests that they don't already know.
So we've tackled and solved big technical problems, as you’ve mentioned, because we've worked on the hardware and software problems that unlock the potential of UAVs, and we've also spent years co-developing mobile tools.
But the key to working with the harvester communities is working and testing these tools with them in the field to be sure that we're communicating the most useful data in the most understandable way to the IPLCs who do that hard work on the ground.
These years of development and trust-building were difficult, technically and operationally, but we've gathered the unique experience necessary to help anyone interested in NTFP bioeconomies to plan and implement with a high likelihood of success.
Biodiversity Accelerator+: What’s one ask you have for our readers today?
Robert Muggah, Chief Commercial Officer: A growing number of organizations are running long-term land management projects now for carbon or biodiversity credits, or just in the hopes of managing productive conservation. Our solutions help to add an additional line of revenue to forest management projects. So we'd love introductions to any organizations or investors who are trying to drive forward this sort of bioeconomic activity.
Interested to learn more? Check out the Bioverse website, and find out more about the Biodiversity Accelerator+ here.