SilviaTerra founder Zack Parisa spoke yesterday at the Center for the Business and the Environment at Yale 10 year anniversary event hosted at the Google San Francisco office. Other speakers included Dr. Indy Burke, the Dean of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and Stuart DeCew, the Director of CBEY.
Zack spoke about how SilviaTerra originated from his Yale M.F.S. thesis work on helping rural Armenian villages manage their forests better. Without accurate and recent forest inventory information, any management planning was useless. In response, Zack developed what became the core SilviaTerra satellite imagery analysis technology so that he and his small team of local foresters could develop a forest inventory data layer across much of the country.
The focus on enabling better management decisions has been at the heart of SilviaTerra since the very beginning. From our original work enabling villagers in Armenia to manage their firewood supply to helping many of the largest American environmental and industrial landowners achieve their conservation and production goals, SilviaTerra has always been driven by the idea that better data can enable better decisions. Zack described how richer information about our forests is enabling the valuation and management of new, non-fiber ecosystem services and the role that information-providers like SilviaTerra play in building a future where our forests are managed efficiently, accurately, and equitably.
If that sounds like a future you'd like to help build - we're hiring!
