Grant: Alliance Grants

Indigenous led monitoring of protected and conserved areas remains challenging due to its labour intensiveness, and lack of local resources. An area of focus is the enhancement of carbon storage in natural ecosystems, yet measuring carbon storage in natural ecosystems traditionally requires measuring individual trees. The proposed research project in partnership with WWF Canada and TRCA will evaluate opportunities to use consumer grade unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, to enhance forest carbon monitoring in response to needs identified by Indigenous communities. The project will synthesize existing knowledge on relationships between easily observable properties from drones, such as crown diameter, and carbon related metrics such as aboveground biomass. The research team will explore open datasets to derive new models to predict aboveground biomass from crown diameter, and will assess accuracy and uncertainty of crown size-based methods using field measurements. Results will be made available for use through deployment of a web app interface to enable users to quickly estimate carbon content of trees imaged from drones. This web-application will also serve as a participatory science portal where users can submit data that will further reduce uncertainties in drone-based forest carbon monitoring in a Canadian context. This research project will generate societal and environmental benefit for Canada through enhanced understanding of where carbon is stored in our landscape, and enhanced capacity for Indigenous communities to lead monitoring efforts on their territories. This understanding will lead to new knowledge on prioritizing areas for carbon conservation, enhance natural climate solutions and contribute towards Canada's plan to reach Net-Zero emissions by 2050.