A team of academics from the University of Huddersfield partnered with climate tech company Tierra Foods to deliver an innovative, AI-powered monitoring system for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) achieved through forestry.
During a period of 9 months, the university experts leveraged £690,000 (> $850,000) in project funding to design a sophisticated monitoring mechanism that combines different AI technologies.
This initiative was made possible by £496,000 (> $615,000) Innovate UK funding, used by the university academics to hire a team of researchers to carry out the project.
Set on a mission to help global food companies transition towards sustainability, Tierra Foods specializes in biomineralization, a process in which atmospheric CO2 gets mineralized and durably stored in the soil as calcium carbonate with the help of specific plant species.
On this shared project with the University of Huddersfield, Tierra Foods utilized English oak trees located on field sites across the UK, along with plantations of Brosimum Alicastrum trees (also known as ramón or uje) growing at sites in Mexico.
As explained by Marcela Flores, CEO of Tierra Foods, the company refined its biomineralization approach with help from its in-house global experts and leading academics from the universities in Zurich, Neuchâtel, Merida, and Bournemouth.
Flores shared, “The next step is to integrate our findings through software-based technology and put the technology at the service of industry to widen the adoption of nature-based solutions.”
Relevant: Google Invests In Its First Forestry-Based Carbon Removal Credits
Led by Dr. George Bargiannis, Deputy Director of the University’s Centre for Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (CAIS) and part of the University’s School of Computing and Engineering, this project also saw contributions from Dr. Emmanuel Papadakis and Professor Simon Parkinson.
Commenting on this collaboration, Dr. Bargianni said, “We created a digital representation of the carbon capture process, including all relevant biogeochemical factors and metrics.”
The team then fed this representation, along with data collected by Tierra Foods, into machine learning algorithms to create models that could forecast the amount of CO2 captured over a time period, further optimizing these models through the integration of a wider data range.
Read more: Sumitomo Forestry Establishes $420 Million Decarbonization Fund
