Endowment Partner Pursues Phone App to Track Forest Health Threats

The U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities (the Endowment) today made its first foray into engaging citizen scientists by putting its support behind a planned mobile phone application, developed by the Institute of Forest Biotechnology, designed to aid scientist in tracking forest disease and pest outbreaks around the globe.

“For more than three years the Endowment has been working with the USDA Forest Service, Duke Energy and a host of others to explore the potential of modern biotechnology to address burgeoning forest health challenges being driven by globalization and climate change,” said Endowment President Carlton Owen. “The Institute of Forest Biotechnology has been among our core partners in that important work. When they announced plans to ‘crowdsource’ funds for a first-of-its-kind smartphone application to aid scientists in identifying the rapid spread of pests and diseases, we knew that we wanted to participate.”

TreeTaggrTM will use the camera and geolocation functions of a smartphone to “tag” unhealthy trees. The app is the first tool to leverage the availability and connectivity of smartphones for forest health data collection.

The first version of TreeTaggr for an Android device will cost about $20,000. Funding is being sought by another technological and social innovation – crowdfunding (where individuals and organizations pledge to support the capital needs of an initiative via the Internet). To learn more and to make a tax-deductible contribution to the project one need only visit TreeTaggr.org/go.

More than 60 million acres – an area equal to all of the forests in the State of Georgia – are experiencing impacts from pests and diseases that fall outside of historical norms. The pace of impact in the U.S. is accelerating, with a three-fold increase over the last decade.