A Biodiversity Risk Assessment (BioRA) tool has been launched by technology company Ceven that is free to use at its basic level.
BioRA uses satellite imagery, data analytics, and machine learning algorithms to rate the risk of biodiversity loss to a specific area of land.
“As far as our research goes, this is the first location-specific risk analysis tool out there,” Yannick Zehnder, CEO of Ceven told Carbon Pulse.
Available tools on the market cover “very large areas”, while BioRA can zoom in on zones of a few hectares, Zehnder said.
Investors and businesses can use the tool to analyse biodiversity risk over assets ranging from construction sites to forests.
The Thalwil-based Ceven team produces one of five biodiversity loss gradings for the area: ‘stable’, ‘change detected’, ‘distress 1’, ‘distress 2’, or ‘no vegetation’.
For example, the Swiss National Park, a 170km2 wildlife refuge in the east of the country, received a ranking of ‘stable’ with low risk of biodiversity loss.
Ceven compounds 14 publicly available remote sensing sources, which it could not disclose. Using public sources kept costs down while enabling a more transparent process, Zehnder said.
Commercial data such as high-resolution satellite imagery “doesn’t necessarily return better results” and could even produce “fewer usable images per area” than data from public sources, he claimed.
Ceven’s model can eliminate gaps in remote sensing data caused by issues such as cloud cover, he said. “That was actually one of the biggest challenges in developing this risk model.”
BioRA compiles versions of four widely used metrics showing indicators over the last five years as part of its process:
- Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), for quantifying the health of plant life by analysing infrared data
- Enhanced Vegetation Index, to support the NDVI
- Moisture Stress Index, for quantifying leaf water content
- Normalised Burn Ratio, to identify the severity of burnt areas
NDVI shows disturbances to vegetation from stressors such as logging, flooding, pests, wildfire, or crop harvesting. For example, the tool showed a drop in NDVI in five-hectare Turo Park in Barcelona following a dry spring in 2023, indicating a loss of vegetation, Ceven said.
The tool is currently free to use through submitting coordinates via the Ceven website, but deeper biodiversity analysis through soil sampling comes with a cost dependent on the area size, Zehnder said.
Soil samples processed by a third party can estimate the present biodiversity value of a site by analysing its environmental DNA, Zehnder said.
Ceven is speaking with potential users in large and small nature-based solution project developers from areas including Mexico, Southeast Asia, South Africa, Switzerland, and Germany, Zehnder said. “We have interest but we are at the very beginning.”
The tool could be used for measuring risks in biodiversity credit projects, but the company would not work with initiatives used to offset harm to biodiversity elsewhere, he said.
By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com
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