RealTrees

Tropical forests are vital stores of carbon and biodiversity. We are committed to regenerating these often degraded landscapes by planting native species, and to stopping deforestation by giving communities alternative sustainable forms of income. Most carbon capture and reforestation programs to date leave out smallholders rather than empowering them. RealTrees will change that.

 We’ll accomplish this by eliminating exhaustive field work to collect metrics, connecting donors to trees virtually, and collecting real time carbon capture data ---all with a phone. The RealTrees mobile application utilizes A.I. and blockchain technology to collect data on every tree a farmer plants, facilitating access to tree planting donations and allowing proof of transparency for supply chains of non-timber forest products.

 Scaled globally, this can dramatically improve the livelihoods of smallholders, while improving data on trees’ carbon capture for researchers, and giving donors for tree planting a gold standard of transparency and proven impact.

There are very few ways for smallholders to directly benefit from reforestation and other ecologically restorative activities, despite the fact that smallholders (especially in the tropics) are uniquely positioned to conserve and regenerate forest cover while also generating multiple co-benefits, from food security to ecosystem services. Carbon capture schemes have historically favored large scale projects due to verification cost thresholds that are prohibitive to activities at an individual farmer- or village- scale. Significantly, carbon markets in general have yet to gain the broad traction needed for these mechanisms to truly impact carbon bottom lines and stand a chance of reversing climate change.

Given the visible history of unsuccessful environmental initiatives, from uncompleted tree planting promises to corporate greenwashing, many of the actors poised to  contribute substantially to the fight against climate change now rightly demand greater transparency and proof of impact. How do we know that a tree for which we donated has been planted? How do we know that the tree continues to grow and contribute meaningfully to carbon impacts in the future? And how can we put the power to offer this transparency directly into the hands of smallholders and community-level actors? This is what RealTrees will do.

RealTrees combines a simple-to-use field app for registering trees with a sophisticated back-end for analysing images of those trees. Every tree our organization (Camino Verde, i.e. ‘CV’) plants is documented using a smartphone app taking a few photos per tree. Whether it’s staff at the CV reforestation center or a farmer at her own agroforestry parcel, the field app user experience is simple, straightforward, and extremely efficient, under 30 seconds per tree.

Analysis of the images and smartphone metadata (GPS, compass degree) by algorithms allows us to produce the following datapoints for each tree: exact location, size, and carbon capture. Measuring each tree by hand with diametric tape is a thing of the past. All tree data is entered onto a blockchain (Stellar), creating a unique, indelible record of proof of the tree’s existence and growth.

Individual trees registered are sponsored by people and corporate donors, triggering incentives for farmers. The donor user experience is content-rich, offering access to data and images for every single tree sponsored. Users can see the growth of their individual trees in real time, read fascinating species profiles or planting region profiles, and enjoy beautiful images of the tree species they sponsor.

RealTrees serves smallholders struggling to achieve their livelihood goals in ecologically sustainable ways. Amazonian smallholders and indigenous communities often have few market opportunities for only a limited number of products such as timber and game meat, yet rely on participation in the cash economy for health care (including emergencies), education, and, increasingly, for food. Opportunities to generate income via non-destructive, renewable, and regenerative strategies rarely reach the average Amazonian farmer. But it is these smallholders who make the day-to-day decisions that ultimately cause deforestation numbers to increase or decrease. 

RealTrees envisions tree planting as an income-generating activity for the hundreds of millions of smallholders of the world. If the strongest barrier to greater tree planting is the period of time required for a tree, such as a fruit tree, to become productive, RealTrees provides a mechanism for tree sponsorship to underwrite this critical initial phase of tree growth, providing incentives directly to farmers for every tree kept alive.

RealTrees also serves reforestation initiatives seeking to provide top-tier levels of transparency - a proof of impact -  to the donors that make this important work possible. Camino Verde is just the first member in a small but growing cohort of reforestation organizations whose tree planting appears as sponsorship offerings to donors. The second cohort member is a reforestation initiative targeting South Sudanese refugee settlements in northern Uganda. Beyond this cohort, the RealTrees technology will also be offered as an SaaS licensing agreement to reforestation initiatives wanting to offer the same degree of compelling tree planting transparency to their donors.

Finally, RealTrees serves companies whose supply chains rely on products sourced from trees. Whether rubber, timber, frankincense, rosewood, vanilla, etc., RealTrees is a holistic supply chain transparency solution for a thorough (and blockchained) documentation of the origin of product. Today’s markets demand this level of transparency for a growing number of raw materials, and tomorrow’s consumers will want to know if they can trust a supplier’s bold sustainability claims. The RealTrees technology will also be offered as an SaaS licensing agreement to companies wanting to provide transparency of origin to their employees and/or customers.

RealTrees addresses the 1st dimension of the Challenge by making data collection easier so farmers, nonprofits, and even municipal governments can track growth rates of trees. This data is used to monitor biodiversity (in terms of tree species) and carbon capture of these initiatives. RealTrees data also enriches our understanding of the growth rates of hundreds of species, improving our ability to predict carbon outcomes for various species, but also allowing for by-tree growth data capture in time. 

RealTrees also addresses dimension 3, giving smallholders access to tree sponsorship incentives and transparent supply chains for non-timber forest products.

RealTrees is at a prototype phase as we enter beta-testing and initial data capture to explore its potential applications. We will be deploying it in communities, but the application will not be available to the smallholder farmers we work with quite yet - Camino Verde’s field staff will be holding the technology as they work with farmers to ensure it is user-ready before it is deployed. As we go through this process and make any necessary adjustments with our technology partners, Bext360, we will also be collecting an initial data set that will allow us to test our various hypotheses about what can be done with this data and who it can serve (i.e. how it can be used by researchers to calculate carbon capture, what companies are interested in using this tech to trace their supply chains, etc).

As far as we know, no solution currently on the market has successfully sought to address the inefficiencies of workflow of forestry plantation inventory, in order to provide tree-by-tree impact assessment for donors sponsoring planting. At a recent webinar by World Resources Institute on their newly launched restoration platform TerraMatch, the presenters acknowledged that less-accurate satellite and other aerial imagery is used because of the challenges of reliably acquiring on-ground field data on individual trees. RealTrees seeks to overcome this exact impasse by making field collection on trees simple and efficient.

Also innovative is the RealTrees user dashboard, an approach to make tree sponsorship a rich and varied content experience. Donors can access images of their own individual trees sponsored, as well as species profiles with high quality images and fascinating descriptions of species. Profiles for each region, including relevance and proximity to conservation areas, are also included. Users are encouraged to unlock additional content by sponsoring a greater number of tree species.

Finally, it is sadly innovative that our approach takes into consideration the experience of 21st century tree-planting smallholders from places like the Peruvian Amazon. The same tools for visualizing individual trees and tree species’ information are available to participating smallholders as a useful, engaging tool for inventorying their agroforestry parcels. Farmers are offered incentives for individual trees grown and maintained, but also bonuses for reaching biodiversity milestones in their planting, and they are able to track their tree stocks on a dynamic user dashboard.

RealTrees currently serves over 100 smallholder families from indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon, who form our initial cohort of beneficiaries. It also facilitates the work of Camino Verde’s total staff of 20.

In one year’s time, the number of tree-planting smallholders benefited by RealTrees will reach over 2,000, with the inclusion of tree planters from additional regions and contexts, the first being reforestation in and around a South Sudanese refugee settlement in Uganda. In 5 years, RealTrees will serve over 250,000 participating smallholders in Peru, Ecuador, Uganda, and other contexts to be determined, including over 100,000 South Sudanese refugee families. In 10 years, we envision reaching 2,000,000 tree-planting farmers.

While growing RealTrees’ own planting cohort is an important goal, the technology will also be offered as a SaaS to reforestation initiatives wanting to offer transparency to donors in the same fashion as RealTrees, but in their own branded environment, for their own trees. Other customers include companies using RealTrees to document the trees of origin for their supply chain. Finally, RealTrees is working to develop a public-facing citizen science tool for monitoring (and carbon capture calculation) of public trees. The pilot for this is the city of Puerto Maldonado, officially designated Peru’s “biodiversity capital.” RealTrees can help municipal planners demonstrate and quantify the carbon and biodiversity value through urban tree inventories, benefiting from the same ease of field use and AI automation for determining location, size and carbon capture of trees as in RealTrees’ other applications.

Our measurable indicators are:

-Total trees registered in RealTrees database: 100,000 in year one; 4,000,000 in 5 years

-Total species registered: 500 in year one; 1,000 in 5 years

-Regions registered: 2 in year one; 10 in 5 years

-Tree-planting families registered: 100 in year one; 250,000 in 5 years

-Average income generated per family in the form of tree sponsorship incentive payments: $500 per family per year in year one; $2,500 per family per year by year 5

-Total income generated for smallholder families: $50,000 in year one; $625,000,000 in 5 years

-New trees planted annually by RealTrees donors: 100,000 in year one; 1,000,000 in 5 years

-Number of reforestation initiative SaaS clients: 1 in year one; 5 in 5 years; prominence of clients as a qualitative indicator

-Volume of trees registered by reforestation initiative SaaS clients: 50,000 in year one; 500,000 in 5 years

-Number of supply chain transparency SaaS clients: 1 in year one; 10 in 5 years; prominence of clients as a qualitative indicator

-Volume of trees registered by supply chain transparency SaaS clients: 10,000 in year 1; 200,000 in 5 years 

We are currently a nonprofit, but in the process of creating for-profit public benefit corporation (PBC), which may eventually seek B-Corp certification.

Full-time staff: 2

Part-time staff: 7

Contractors: 5

Participating smallholder families to date: 106

Undoubtedly, the experiences of planting and monitoring hundreds of thousands of trees in adverse logistical conditions of Indigenous communities in the Amazon forms a key segment of the RealTrees knowledge base. Performing endless manual data entry inventorying mosquito-rich reforestation plots was what inspired us to develop RealTrees. Making tools accessible to our community partners – some of whom are not literate, let alone smartphone fluent – and efficient for use in the field have therefore been key priorities since the onset.

Our lead Robin Van Loon has worked in community-based reforestation for 18 years, planting trees with our current cohort of tree-planting smallholders since 2013. His experience leading Camino Verde to plant almost 500 native tree species in Peru led to consultation work to help establish native species tree nurseries in the surprisingly biodiverse context of northern Uganda, where the project’s efforts have led to over 250,000 trees planted, representing 50 native species.  

Assistant director Blair Butterfield is a farmer, artist, and communicator, having worked in contexts as distinct as southern Florida and Argentina, creating public-facing regeneration and sustainability projects. She focuses on UX:UI and content development for RealTrees.

Notably, these two are the only Americans on our team, which is otherwise made up of local Peruvians from the regions of Madre de Dios and Loreto. It is the extensive knowledge of local people that has allowed our work to be appreciated as impactful by our community partners. Our work cannot be successful without the approval of these partners.

Camino Verde has always been committed to ensuring the majority of staff, including the leadership team, are local Peruvians and are part of the communities in which we work because we believe this the best way to achieve our goals. The starting point of all our work is recognition and application of local, Indigenous forest knowledge. We want to ensure that communities - Indigenous ones in particular, due to where we work - are included in our work and that our projects are always a participatory process and a partnership. We always begin projects with on-the-ground outreach to ensure existing ideas, traditions, boundaries, etc. are respected.

Furthermore, we strive to maintain gender equity in our leadership team. We are currently achieving this with over ⅔ of our executive staff being female, indicating that our recruiting and hiring practices are currently working. In general, when we have two candidates with equal qualifications, we have preferential hiring for the local and/or female candidate; if these two goals were to conflict, we will have to consider what supports greater equity in our team overall.

So that all our projects remain community-centric and equitable, we also seek out partners (such as CACE and the Wise Women of Uganda) that have a similar vision of being rooted in local communities and maintaining gender equity (not just parity).

RealTrees is at a dynamic point of inflection, where increasingly fully formed offerings are being met with enthusiasm by current and potential customers. Though our team has decades of accumulated experience in reforestation which is clearly relevant to this initiative, it is also true that business development for RealTrees presents new challenges in marketing, networking, and product improvement feedback loops.

 Building connections with other problem-solvers with a shared purpose (ecosystem resilience) in a creative, mutually supportive environment will dramatically improve the efficiency of our learning curve as we expand the number of trees in our database and the number of clients who rely on our offerings. We believe that RealTrees is uniquely poised to leverage the support provided by Solve to exponentially grow our impact in the years to come. In addition to welcome visibility and a gold seal affirmation of our value proposition, horizontal knowledge sharing with other Solvers is a particularly attractive piece of the package.

 Finally, we are also at a stage of development in which seed funding, such as that offered to Solvers, is particularly welcome. Additionally, we were particularly inspired to meet the Solve challenge given the relevance of RealTrees to several of the prize areas (for example, for refugee solutions).

As RealTrees grows, finding talented individuals to expand our work is now a key priority, in terms of board members and executive staff.

 Finance-oriented support is welcome at this time as we consider the pros and cons of involving different degrees of new investor participation.

 While the key to RealTrees’ functionality is tree growth M&E, we are eager to explore the applications of this technology and the data generated for research across a variety of disciplines (forest inventorying, plantation management, carbon capture, forest landscape restoration).  It will be a truly unique data set to have tree-by-tree information on growth rates for hundreds of species of little-researched trees; we hope to work with researchers to use this dataset to add to the literature on carbon capture of  tropical agroforestry systems and on tropical non-timber (and timber) forest products. Research applications of Real Trees’ data is one way we seek to diversify impact, maximizing utility and expanding use to other organizations, institutions, and municipal governments seeking this type of data for reforestation and forest conservation efforts.

 Finally, while many of the key technological components of RealTrees have already been successfully developed, we welcome the chance to improve – and MIT Solve is a unique opportunity to improve our offerings. Capabilities still under development include AI for species identification and recognition of flowers and fruits. Additionally, on the user-facing side we want to improve our impact visualization tools, for example giving donors video graphics showing their “forest” grow to its present size.

-MIT faculty: for the development and improvement of high-tech components: AI development, database management, and blockchain.

-Terra Genesis International: for the deploying of RealTrees technology in additional supply chain contexts (palm oil, rubber, etc.); and development of a supply chain client base for RealTrees. TGI have been an ally for years. 

-FECONAMAI (Federation of Maijuna Native Communities): for development of the next high-impact hub of tree-planting smallholders involving an additional 100 families in new communities. Based on our experiences to date with FECONA, our impact in terms of families reached in Indigenous communities in Loreto, Peru would be doubled.

-Other South Sudanese refugee settlements in Uganda: building upon the model first deployed at Palorinya, tree planting activities are executed by the local District Forest Office in high-population refugee settlements and the surrounding villages, mitigating the deforestation impact of the refugee settlements for basic needs like firewood.

-OneTreePlanted and Ecosia: for piloting the use of RealTrees as a SaaS with  third party reforestation initiatives, looking to document their own tree planting using the technology in their own branded environment.

-Essential Oils Perú: for implementation of RealTrees technology across the supply chain of essential oil of the endangered species rosewood (Aniba rosaeodora), the non-timber forest product for which RealTrees was initially created.

-Municipalidad Tambopata: for piloting the public “citizen science” use of RealTrees to completely inventory public, urban trees and their impact in terms of carbon capture and biodiversity (species represented). 

As part of RealTrees' phase one reforestation cohort development, we will collaborate with the Native Seeds Moyo project and with US-based non-profit Wild Forests and Fauna and the District Forest Office of Moyo, Uganda, to plant more trees in and around the Palorinya settlement, semi-permanent home to over 100,000 South Sudanese refugees. To date, the Native Seeds Moyo project has planted over 100,000 trees in Palorinya, and next phase plans include the planting over 150,000 additional trees.

These trees help Palorinya residents meet basic needs like firewood and nutrition (through the planting of moringa and fruit trees in home gardens). Significantly, Palorinya and other refugee settlements increase the pressure on nearby forests, particularly for fuelwood, and historically deforestation has increased as a result. Native Seeds Moyo has an innovative approach in that planting will now continue in the villages surrounding the refugee settlement, where villagers have larger land holdings and slightly greater resources to invest in tree establishment.  Populating the area adjacent to the refugee settlements will ease pressure on wild forests while benefiting villagers with non-timber forest products. 

This is the kind of high-impact reforestation that we emphasize in the development of the RealTrees cohort. Native trees are planted and linked to tree sponsorship, allowing us to provide annual incentives for participating smallholders for each tree sustained and grown in time.

RealTrees uses AI to identify tree species based off of pictures. With this additional prize money, we could expand our project to more farmers and regions (we are tentatively hoping to work with an organization in Ecuador to expand our Amazonian cover) more quickly, meaning more raw data on more trees (especially unique species) to build the capacity of the application and enhance its potential. The more species we can capture, the better, to build a robust encyclopedia of tree data. 

This faster expansion would also benefit from consultations with other AI developers to ensure the tech keeps up with the level of content. 

RealTrees uses blockchain to ensure the traceability of its trees for donors. The use of blockchain for this type of sustainability initiative is unique and innovative, and we want to make this level of traceability the gold standard in the field. Additional funding through this prize would allow us to deploy our technology with more farmers in more communities faster, getting this solution for both ecological sustainability and viable income opportunities in these populations off the ground. 

We also think that this could be a really useful technology for supply chain transparency for non-timber forest products, and this funding would allow us to spend time and resources seeking out new clients. Crucially, we could also make capital investments in more and better equipment to process products (namely essential oils) from our reforestation center and from the 106 families we currently work with in Peru in order to get these products ready for market sooner, in order to address the demand we hope to generate with the RealTrees capability.