A low-cost, AI-powered Measurement Verification and Reporting System for growing trees with smallholder farmers

Limited access to low-cost tools to measure, report, and verify (MRV) tree growth with smallholder farmers limits the scaling of tree planting efforts in developing countries. Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers the potential for low-cost, reliable, and accessible measurement and verification tools to be developed for an MRV platform to scale tree planting efforts in developing countries. Here, we present an AI-powered non-contact tree diameter measurement and verification tool. We have developed an AI-powered algorithm that accurately estimates the diameter of a tree from an image of the tree with a reference object. This non-contact measurement method utilizes semantic segmentation and image processing techniques to analyze an image of the tree with the reference object. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated on 142 trees with tape-measured diameters at breast height ranging from 5 to 60 cm. A regression analysis between predicted and measured diameter values had an R2 and an RMSE of 0.97 and 2.23 cm, respectively. Thus, using a smartphone application, the non-contact method developed here can empower anyone to accurately measure and report tree growth by just taking pictures of the trees with the reference object. The images submitted with on-farm measurements serve as data for future verification operations using the AI-powered algorithm. With the reference object serving as a unique tree identifier, a trees survival and diameter measurements can be tracked over time. The MRV system described here, with the developed AI-powered non-contact tree diameter measurement and verification tool, can empower organizations to plant, grow, and monitor trees with anyone, including smallholder farmers.