Partner Profile | Understory

Written by: Jessica Alvarez, Communications & Content Manager

Understory was founded in 2020 by Christopher Knight and Ross Davison with the goal of modernizing environmental management. Since then, the company has grown into a diverse team of technologists, ecologists, and engineers revolutionizing their ability to monitor and protect natural resources for communities that rely on them. Understory’s data-driven roadmaps aim to help people manage land, preserve biodiversity, and tackle climate change more effectively.

The two co-founders came together with diverse expertise. Ross is a specialist in the capture and analysis of remotely sensed data for conservation. Chris is an ecologist focused on understanding the drivers of healthy ecosystems in order to manage and conserve natural capital. With their respective expertise and working as a team, they first developed an earlier company, called Comon Solutions.

“When we started Comon Solutions, we started it as a kind of Community Science Project. We were coordinating hobbyist drone pilots to capture data for biologists,” explained Ross. “What we ended up figuring out is that additional data is great, but then, when we get that data to the biologists they’d ask, ‘okay, now what do we do with it?’ Then we realized that this was just one more inaccessible data set to be archived and untouched.”

The two then started to figure out what were the components that they could take from this kind of drone data and turn them into something more meaningful and practical for the people who are doing the work on the ground. It was then that they began vegetation mapping.

“When you look at geology or water flow, all of that’s pretty well documented. In a lot of ways, the things that have been real high dollar value markets in industries like mining or oil production, which have a ton of money, have kind of been solved. But if you’re looking at dynamic ecosystems and trying to figure out what is the population distribution or things like that, it’s a tougher question. And it’s something that natural resource managers or conservation groups are interested in and are not necessarily big industries,” said Chris.

After college, the two co-founders moved in together in Berkeley, but the company was still just a concept. At the time, Ross was working with remote sensing technology to save endangered heritage and Chris was working in wetlands conservation. After discussing how their work overlapped they noticed the huge increase in hobbyist drone pilots and came to the conclusion that community scientists could be employed to capture imagery for conservation professionals to turn into maps and metrics, which is how their business started.

“Chris would always talk to me about how these tools can definitely be used in ecology,” said Ross. “For ecology, they use traditional methods—essentially going into the field and doing everything manually with coarse resolution levels. So we started coming up with a new and more efficient method with higher resolution,” said Chris.

After working together on Community Science data capture and analytics for some time, the two have shifted their focus to adaptive management. “We’re motivated, because we really care about the environment and we noticed that, unfortunately, environmental monitoring doesn’t really get the same amount of attention as other industries, so we wanted to help modernize the field and give it the tools that it needs to tackle things like climate change and other environmental impacts,” said Chris.

Monitoring efforts are too costly and limited to areas that humans can access – their goal with Understory is to supplement human capacity so that when someone goes to a site, they can rapidly assess and do it more frequently. “That, in our mind, is key because, with climate change we’re going to have these sorts of changes happening on a really fast scale and we’re not necessarily sure that the environmental field is equipped to really handle monitoring and tracking and so we are trying to mitigate those changes,” explained Ross.

Understory is actively working with Blue Forest to understand how to monitor the benefits of ecosystem restoration, leveraging Understory’s drone mapping and AI processing techniques to better visualize and quantify the impact of restored landscapes.

Natmap, Understory’s brain child, makes it simple to understand and support the complexities of ecological health. It will be launched in August 2022 and demos are available upon request at info@understory.ai.