Meet the Detectives Solving Crimes Against Trees

The technology company Pachama has developed a way to combine “satellite, drone, and lidar images” to estimate the size of trees and forests around the globe. Its founders were motivated by the carbon offset industry. If companies want to offset emissions, the rationale goes, it is better to know precisely where forests need to be restored. Pachama’s technology can do just that.

Differing laws, policing, and management across borders has made it difficult to combat the huge industry that is Wildlife Crime, but a new approach in Canada is showing the way for some common ground. By collaborating with local sellers, a micro-chip can be attached to pelts to track their movement and discern whether the pelt is being sold illegally or not -- even across borders.

University of Alaska researchers have developed biodegradable insulation boxes and building materials made from local beetle-killed spruce trees and fungal fibers that successfully shipped seafood across the country while offering a sustainable alternative to plastic foam that could reduce Alaska's 1+ million annual styrofoam boxes, create local jobs, and address rural housing quality issues.

Tree mapping helps researchers understand deforestation and climate change, however the technologies used often miss trees that aren’t clustered. Researchers, in collaboration with NASA, used high-resolution satellite images, previously only available to commercial entities, to find a surprisingly large number of trees in the Sahara Desert. Using AI deep learning and one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers at the University of Illinois, they identified more than 1.8 billion trees, manually marking nearly 90,000 so the computer could “learn” which shapes and shadows indicated the presence of trees.

BlueConduit, an analytics startup, applies statistical models to identify neighborhoods and households that might have lead pipes. The models include dozens of factors, such as the age of the home and proximity of other homes where lead has been found, to help predict likely locations of lead pipes and create a ranking by likelihood that cities can use to prioritize which pipes to examine. In Flint, MI, about 70% of the homes identified using the models had lead pipes, compared to about 15% of homes where excavations did not use the model. The company is working with organizations in dozens of other cities.

As Canada sees an increase in gun violence, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are increasing their capacity to do ballistic imaging – an analysis that is able to potentially connect multiple crimes. Across the country, individual police agencies are developing their own way of conducting this analysis or working with the RCMP, which has access to an integrated network of crime information, to expedite the process.

Countries around the world have been testing the use of artificial intelligence, or AI, as assistive technology to solving crimes. From creating algorithms that can identify victims of sex trafficking online to developing machine learning mechanisms that can identify and distinguish different DNA strands, officials hope that AI can help law enforcement more efficiently and effectively solve complex cases.

Clean cookstoves can reduce indoor air pollution, along with a host of other social and environmental benefits. However, uptake has been slow in countries such as Uganda because such stoves tend to be more expensive for families in the short-term.

A human rights center is working with government agencies to identify the remains of people who died crossing the U.S. border. The partnership is helping the families of the dead find out what happened to their loved ones.

Project Kondo has identified and archived over 7 million New York Times web pages that contain news content in outdated and unsupported formats. Readers can report broken links, but the number of sites to review is too big to do by hand, so the team created an automated tool called ‘munger’ to identify JavaScript with unsupported code and clean it up into HTML that can be shared widely. In order to preserve the content exactly how it was originally published, the websites are moved to a different domain, archive.nytimes.com, where readers are notified that they are reading an archived article.