Nathalie Post  
In this episode, I am speaking with Nadina Galle, who's an award winning ecological engineer and entrepreneur whose innovative practice spans the fields of sustainability technology and urban ism. We talk about her work, and how she applies emerging technologies to improve the health of urban ecosystems through a framework she developed called the Internet of Nature.

Beyond that, she's an amazing storyteller. And she's really able to translate the complexities of our field to very relatable and human concepts. So, without further ado, I'm very excited to share this episode with you. So let's get into that.

Hi Nadina, and welcome to the human-centred AI podcast. It is great to have you here today. So for our listeners who might not know you, could you give a little introduction about yourself and your background?

Nadina Galle  
Thanks, Nathalie, it's great to be here. My name is Nadina, I'm an ecological engineer and entrepreneur, dedicated to applying emerging technologies, essentially, to improve the health of urban ecosystems, something I call the Internet of Nature.

Nathalie Post    
That's great to hear, and like, can you tell us a little more about what got you here? Why did you even consider ecological engineering in the first place?

Nadina Galle
So when I was a kid, I did not know what ecological engineering was. And essentially I got here because I am Dutch, originally, but I grew up in a typical North American suburb, in southwestern Ontario and Canada. And growing up there, I was always fascinated by how urban development seemed to encroach on nature. And it seemed like there was no end for urban development. And it raised a lot of questions about this kind of inherent imbalance that you would see between nature and urban development and it basically drove me to want to build better ecosystems for both people and for nature.

Nathalie Post  
And, so how did you embark on that journey? Like how, you know, like, what did that look like for you?

Nadina Galle  
So the first thing for me was, before I can begin to come up with any solutions, I need to understand how the earth functions. So I moved to the City of Toronto, and I did my bachelor's there in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. So on the one hand, understanding where humans came from, really the evolutionary biology perspective, but also the ecological problems of today. And how do those two things balance each other out, or not. And from there, I moved to Amsterdam, back to my home country of the Netherlands, and I went to the University of Amsterdam and studied Earth Sciences for my masters. And that was really driven by just wanting to have a better technical understanding of some of the more present ecological issues, but also some of the tools that we could actually use to go about and measure those issues. So learning about different tools like soil probing and remote sensing. And that kind of is what first introduced me to the kind of more technological side of ecology.

After I graduated, I worked at Metabolic for a number of years as an industrial and urban ecologist. And I loved working there, I learned an incredible amount from the founder and CEO of Metabolic, Eva Gladek. I always tell her, she's a walking encyclopaedia. And I, I learned more in six months of working at Metabolic than I ever did in my six years of studies before then, I learned an incredible amount, not just about sustainability, and what it means to be a sustainable city or a sustainable organisation, but also what Metabolic uses which is integral and its work, something called systems thinking. So really starting to understand sustainability, not just from a solutions perspective, but really understanding the system. And that's something that I've, I've carried with me throughout my work. And I got the opportunity to do a PhD, which I embarked on and that PhD was in a field called ecological engineering, which is a relatively new field. It's, you know, it started about 50/60 years ago, were kind of the first writings, specifically two brothers in the US, the Odum brothers, they did an incredible amount of work, really putting forward this framework of ecological engineering. And then William Mitch in the late 90s, and early 2000s, really kind of further builds on the field of ecological engineering. And what the field hopes to do is basically apply best practice from ecology and engineering, and combine the two to build better ecosystems for both people and nature. And when I read that, and when I read the papers that were published under this header of ecological engineering, I was like, this is what I've been looking for. So that's what drew me to do my PhD in it, which I just completed a couple months ago.

Nathalie Post    
So tell me a bit more about your PhD? Because you mentioned it briefly before internet of nature. But I'm very curious to hear, what is the Internet of Nature? To start with a very obvious question.

Nadina Galle  
So the Internet of Nature, which is also the title of my dissertation. So the Internet of Nature is basically a concept that arose from being extremely also throughout my work at Metabolic seeing these, these agendas, these visions that municipalities had to be on the one hand a smarter city, and on the other hand, a greener city. And what you saw in these agendas is that basically they ran parallel to each other in these silos. And I was fascinated by you know, perhaps there was ways that we could actually apply the Smart City movement to actually be able to better monitor urban ecology and actually build these better ecosystems that I was so driven to do. And the Internet of Nature, essentially, is the concept that arose from really intersecting those two things. And the Internet of Nature, essentially, is this world in which every part of the urban ecosystem has a digital representation, so that we may actually be able to better enhance and restore nature's ability to combat climate change, but at the same time, also reconnect people back into nature, which I believe is an integral part of building an overall sustainable city.

Nathalie Post  
So why do you think nature should be digitally represented, and also, what would be the alternative?

Nadina Galle    
It's a cliche to say this, but you can't manage what you don't measure. And I think nature inherently has the capability to be able to, intercept stormwater, to filter pollutants, to be so much more than an aesthetic value, all these things known broadly as ecosystem services, it's just a matter of giving it the space to do so. And a lot of time when we actually go about better moderating those things, we're actually able to give nature, a well respected deserved spot in cities. And I think that comes along with having the tools and the data at your disposal to be able to to better put a plan into place.

Nathalie Post  
And so in what ways did that form itself during your PhD, like, in what ways did you try to digitally represent nature? And like, how did that work? What worked well, what didn't work well?

Nadina Galle  
So that was, that was a huge experiment that lasted a number of years of seeing, okay, which technologies actually might, you know, have a place in, in the Internet of Nature? So one of the things that I worked on was the use of an IoT sensor network. So how could we use, you know, IoT sensors, whether that was on Wi Fi or on a LoRaWAN network, to essentially be able to monitor soil health. And this brought up a lot of interesting questions and before you can even lay down a sensor network, how many sensors do you need per tree? And how can you make sure that the sensor is actually giving a representative idea, full picture, of what that soil actually is? I mean, soil in cities is incredibly variable. So we also have to make sure that the technology that we are using is, is actually giving us the outputs that are usable as well. Another thing that I experimented, another technology that I experimented with was high resolution remote sensing, specifically, satellite imagery. These images have been used in the last couple years for Defence and Intelligence, agriculture, but very little applications have looked at Urban Forestry. So it was looking at the potential uses there, for example, creating a tree inventory based on satellite imagery alone. Something else that I looked at was, could we perhaps use citizen opinion? Could we mine citizen opinion, as you know, has been done in the hospitality and the product services sector? You know, when there's a new iPhone out, Apple might actually look on Amazon reviews and see what they might have to tweak in their next iteration based on what people are writing in their reviews. Could we use that, but then use reviews that have been done about urban greenspaces to glean information about how cities might actually go about improving those parks. Those are just a couple of examples and many more, but those are just some of the things I've been working on basically to, to iterate the Internet of Nature and its applications, because I do believe the best way to to learn is by doing.

Nathalie Post  
Yeah, no, absolutely. And so in terms of by doing, because you set up the Green City Watch, programme or project. Can you tell us a little bit about that? And what that is?

Nadina Galle  
Yeah, so Green City Watch is an open source initiative that builds off of some of the remote sensing work that I just mentioned. So Green City watch was was basically born after myself and three co founders, from the University of Amsterdam. Basically, we wanted, we won a challenge that was set forward by Maxar Technologies, which was and still is the largest commercial supplier of satellite imagery. And they essentially, they had the question and said, you know, we have this high res imagery, it's being used for all these sectors. But perhaps there are ways that we can use the imagery to accelerate one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals. And the four of us as co founders, but also, as fellow Earth scientists, we were, you know, we've done all our fieldwork, you know, from Peru, to Iceland, to Serbia, all over the world. And yet, all of us were incredibly fascinated by the very nature at our doorstep, which, just like 70%, of all the other Europeans, is in a city, where most of us live. And we were part of a study with the University of Amsterdam that showed that green space had actually decreased by 11%, over the last 13 years. So it got us thinking, you know, maybe there's a way to use satellite imagery to not just map the quantity of green space, which had already been done, but actually the quality of green space. So from there, we set out and we developed this, these indicators, all these different these indicator frameworks, all these different ways that you would perhaps measure the quality of green space. In, in situ, in the park itself, what are some of those indicators that we might be able to actually see from space. So an example of that may be the proportion of of green versus grey, or how green the park is during winter months, which is especially relevant if you live in a seasonal place like the Netherlands. And many other cities around the world as well. All these different indicators we developed using just a fusion of all these different remote sensing sources, but with the real focus on high res satellite imagery that ended up winning us this challenge.

And from there, we kind of shot into a catapult of projects with the World Bank, and were able to work with several cities across Europe and also across Indonesia. And before we knew it, we were a full fledged tech startup moving in that direction. And after working on those projects, for a number of years, we started to understand that as much of that indicator framework that we had developed, it still seemed to be a luxury good for a lot of cities. And for us, we're always a mission driven, impact driven organisation from the get go. So we, when we looked kind of into what could be a more relevant project for cities, we quickly turned our attention to creating a tree inventory for cities. A tree inventory is essentially the baseline of any kind of urban forest master plan. It's a database, sometimes with a spatial component of all the trees in a city, or at least those under the public domain, and not in the Netherlands per se, but in a lot of cities around the world, some huge cities that you would be shocked to find out, actually don't have at least not an up to date tree inventory. And the reason being is it's extremely tedious and also costly to create one of these and it often takes a long time, it can take three to seven years to create a full fledged inventory of all the trees in your city. So you can imagine by the time that you've downloaded or you've uploaded that data to the database, it might already be outdated by the time the whole tree inventory is complete.

So we were interested, if you know, high res imagery might actually be able to to augment that process, not as a full replacement, but at least as perhaps a baseline inventory or to complement an existing tree inventory. And last year, when I got the chance to live in Boston, for a number of months, we got in touch with the city of Boston, and specifically through a great department at the city of Boston called the Mayor's Office for New Urban Mechanics, which is essentially Boston's civic RND research lab. And with them and through a whole other host of civic stakeholders, we were able to basically prototype what is now known as TreeTect, which is our urban tree detection algorithm. And we were able to do that for a neighbourhood in Boston and throughout that process we began to understand that moving towards an open source collective may be the best way for us to accelerate our mission. So that's what we did.

Nathalie Post  
Yeah, no, amazing, amazing. And so the open source collective that you're starting, how is that progressing? Like, are you getting in touch with other cities that are joining? Or do you help them with implementation of it as well?

Nadina Galle
Yeah, so there's, there's two sides of it. On the one hand, of course, everything that we've done for Boston and also for some other projects are, are now open source. So those workflows are available for any city that feels like they have the competencies in house to be able to do it. And for those that don't, of course, we're still here to be able to help them throughout that process as well and to partner with organisations. And I think that's something that's really in our DNA at Green City Watch is working directly with partners in kind of a rapid iteration process, so that we're really developing something that's useful to the people that are using it in the field, because that's our most important goal at the end of the day, that what we're building for them is, yes, it's technology. Yes, it's an exciting emerging technology. But it has to be useful at the end of the day.

Nathalie Post
And I'm curious. So since you're, well, given your work with the cities, like a big topic right now is obviously the ethical implications of using, let's say, like monitoring technologies in general. And I know that you're not monitoring people in this case, but  trees and nature. But is this a topic that is being discussed, like in these conversations with the cities and what is the the general gist that you can give from that?

Nadina Galle
Yeah, indeed, it's, it's something that although we might not be scanning people's faces, we are scanning people's trees. And one of the exciting things about the technology that we develop with TreeTect is that it's, you know, a satellite image doesn't, you know, differentiate between public and private land, and a tree that's planted on private land is still giving the community that surrounds it a whole lot of benefits. So it's actually in the city's interest to understand what's going on with that tree, whether that's an invasion with pests, again, if a tree on private land has a pest invasion, or any kind of sickness, it can easily spread to the next tree over, and as soon as it's on public trees, then it's a city's problem.

So there's, and there's also things in certain cities like private tree ordinances, which actually protects trees that are on private land that the city doesn't even own. But if it's a tree over a certain size, the city actually has regulations in place that don't allow you to just cut down that tree for a new development, for example, and this is done to protect the urban forest. The only problem with that is that's extremely difficult to enforce, and there are certain cities that we've talked to that despite them planting 5/10 thousand new trees every single year, they're still losing trees, they simply can't keep up with the rate of deforestation that's happening on private land. So this is a massive problem. And our technology in that could be a possible solution to be able to, if not enforce at least track that it's happening, and in a cost effective way.

The problem with that, though, is once the city becomes, or not the problem, but a potential problem might be that once the city is aware of that information, then becomes a big legal question. Does that mean they're also liable? So if they know that there's a tree on private land, and they know approximately, perhaps its species or its health or its size, these different attributes that you could, you know, perhaps identify with high res satellite imagery, does that then also make it liable if that tree then the next day falls on someone? For example, if the city is aware of that information, what does that mean for them? So that's a huge liability issue, in the same way that, you know, if there's a if there's a tree root that pops out from the sidewalk, and someone's walking along that sidewalk and trips and God forbid, breaks something, or worse, when they trip over that tree root, the city is liable. So that's a huge, a huge question mark. And I think that's why getting back to why we like to work in close partnership with cities when developing these technologies, that's so critical to us, because they can let us know from their perspective, what exactly they need help with, and maybe certain things that the technology shouldn't touch on just yet, because the legal structure simply isn't there to keep up with the technological advancements.

Nathalie Post    
So how do you deal with that in the conversations you're having with the cities. Is this really often a prominent conversation where there's, you know, you end up with a conclusion of: these things, we do want to do, this we don't want to do if we have that information? Or is it way more out in the open or, how does that look like?

Nadina Galle  
I mean, it plays a prominent role in the sense that a city may say, okay, these are, you know, the boundaries between public and private land, don't give us the information for private trees. So it might, it might be as simple as that. Or otherwise, you know, they might say, okay, you can give us the locations, but not any attributes of that tree. Because if you just, if you only know the location, you really can't be held liable for very much. As soon as you start to know more information about the health, the current status of that tree, it becomes a little bit more of a grey area. But there's also initiatives like the city of Amsterdam actually, and the city of Helsinki partnered together recently to launch, I think it's just called the AI open register, which includes all the or at least some, and the hope is to populate it more, the algorithms that the city uses within within its, you know, civic processes, and actually making those open source to give citizens a better idea of, you know, what, what kind of AI is being used in that capacity? So that might be a way forward to is that you're actually making the citizens aware of, of what they're tracking?

Nathalie Post  
And now, we were obviously talking a lot about cities. And as we're recording this in 2020, I think we're all pretty aware that life is not the same as before. And so I'm wondering, do you think the current pandemic that we're living through, will change the way urban life is, and if so, then how?

Nadina Galle  
I think there's there's two main trends that you're seeing, on the one hand, during the first lockdown that we had in March and April, on May, urban nature started to take on rules that it that it never had before. All of a sudden, urban nature was the only place that you could go to for a little bit of refuge, it was the only place where you could move your body, play with your kids, it was used as a as a classroom as as a place for meditation as a place for work.

Most people that were living in urban centres, most of them didn't have the luxury of having their own little private green space, so they would go in masses to these public green spaces. And that was interesting, because I think more than ever, the importance of green space in cities was really highlighted and really started to become a top priority for for a lot of cities, in the same way that we saw this transition with, with biking as well. Of course, we're from Amsterdam, but in a lot of other cities, biking infrastructure is not at the same level. And you know, closing down streets and making room for restaurants so that people could dine outside all of a sudden, it seemed like these interventions that you know, these these, these urbanists have, which I count myself one, wanted for years, all of a sudden, were put in fast mode and were created, which is incredible to see.

And I think it was also so important because when you live in a small apartment, and you're in a lockdown scenario, green space is really the only place where you can still maybe get your daily dose of vitamin D, which, you know, ironically enough, is a key virus fighting agent.

So I think that on the one hand, urban nature became more important than ever before. On the other hand, of course, you're starting to see now that we're going into almost a second lockdown phase that the people who can, will leave the city. Absolutely. Because they're starting to realise, you know, crowded areas are the lifeblood of cities, and all of a sudden crowded areas have become public health risks. So when you take those two together, when all the social activities, you know, falls away when restaurants close, when theatres close, when all you can do is, you know, work from home. All that you're left with is your family, your friends and your small apartment. So the people that have the ability to, already we're seeing this, are moving away from cities. We saw this locally in Amsterdam by the housing prices of not in Amsterdam, but of the areas surrounding Amsterdam, increasing during that time. And there's research also in the States, which shows that people have been moving out of cities. But that is only for the people who have the ability to. There are a lot of people for which that is not an option. And that's why I continue to harp on the power that the Internet of Nature can have, because despite people even living in slightly less urbanised situations, there will always be cities and there will always be densely populated cities and urban nature will forever play a key role in that now and in the future.

Nathalie Post  
And does this affect your work in terms of the Internet of Nature, and also how you see that work evolving?

Nadina Galle  
I think on the one hand, I've been in, my work of the last three years have been very much focused on better monitoring tools, especially geared towards municipalities and organisations. You know, how can you really enhance the green benefits whether that's through a sensor network or remote sensing or putting tree bots into the tree to do dangerous work. I've been very much focused on those benefits. And I think now, as through also, of course, the changes that COVID-19 has brought, have become a little bit more focused on, kind of the citizen engagement side of things, and how can technology actually help people better reconnect to nature. So this could be through an app where young and old can actually be able to take a photo of flora or fauna and be able to identify what species it is. And if there's a geotag location to that you can actually create a map of biodiversity in the city, I think, which is a great way to also take the classroom outdoors in a time of, you know, sitting behind a screen all day, both for work and for education. But there's also ways of, you know, scaling up what I, the project I mentioned earlier of doing that, with reviews for Google and TripAdvisor reviews, there's always, you know, you can use those tactics, kind of loosely defined as natural language processing for Facebook posts, for tweets for Instagram, pictures, and their captions, there's all these different ways that we can get a better grasp of how urban nature is being used, both before and during the pandemic, and how we might actually, what that might teach us about how we can improve these spaces, so that they're more accessible for everybody in the city.

Nathalie Post  
I love how you're like really connecting these different forms of tech that are usually used in a very different context, and frequently, to nature. And I think it kind of brings me back to where you started with like the ecological engineering, which is quite a small area still, and I don't think everyone has heard of it, and what it means and like how you become really an ecological engineer. Can you tell us a bit more about that role, and like how that manifests itself in the different types of work that you're doing?

Nadina Galle  
So I think one of the main challenges I have in my work is the fear of tech adoption, specifically in the conservative and sometimes traditional sector of arboriculture, urban forestry, and ecology in general. I think, speaking very broadly and in large generalisations, ecologist in general, have always had the feeling, that if I'm not there in the field, how can you possibly know what's going on? And I think a lot of the work that I do, can optimise and make those, those that field work a lot more efficient. Now, what that means is when you have a fear of tech adoption, it requires, you know, a new breed of professional that in my dissertation, I define as the ecological engineer because on the one hand, the ecological perspective, they need to understand the problems at play. But the engineering perspective, they need to be well versed in the potential solutions that could be there. But they also and it's inherent to be an ecological engineer, you can speak both languages. And I think that translation rule, to really ensuring that these solutions end up being you know, they might not be perfect the first time around, but at least start being iterated is, is crucial to building these better ecosystems that we want.

Nathalie Post  
Yeah, yeah. And so if I remember correctly, but you kind of started more from the theoretical understanding rather than, like, let's say the technology understanding, how did you experience that learning as well, because I can imagine it's quite like it's like the alpha gamma versus like the beta type of work as well. How did you experience that?

Nadina Galle  
Well, I get lucky with my background and ecology and earth science, you're introduced to a lot of these tools and techniques early on in your education. So there was a certain technological affinity for early on. So that definitely helped. And then I think actually, I veered more throughout the process of writing, well, it is called a Doctor of Philosophy for a reason, I started to really philosophise about what the potential role could be of technology in ecology. And vice versa. I think there's a lot to kind of learn from both. And I think that's kind of what helps you, or what helped me at least come up with the concept of the Internet of nature at the end of the day.

Nathalie Post  
Okay, interesting. And so I'm curious to hear your perspective on the following, because you've spoken about the ecological engineering role as kind of the bridging role between the fields of ecology and engineering. But what would you recommend to people who are perhaps specialised in their respective fields, but not so well versed in the technological side of things? How should they use like their knowledge to get to the types of solutions that you were talking about earlier?

Nadina Galle  
I think first and foremost is, you know, sitting around the same tables as technologists, and as data scientists and software engineers, and I think we're having too little of those conversations where those people are talking to each other. And I think they have an incredible amount of knowledge that they could exchange and that they could learn from each other. So I hope to also play a role, you know, profiling myself as, as a translator in that regard, be able to disseminate that knowledge and be able to get those different parties around the table. I think that's step number one, so that we may work towards speaking the same language.

Nathalie Post
Yeah and what else are you currently working on? So we spoke a lot about basically the work you have done before, what are you working on right now?

Nadina Galle  
So my big drive right now is to bring the concept of the Internet of Nature forward. And I see a couple of key ways to do that. For one, I'm speaking a lot. So I think that's, you know, speaking and storytelling is one of the most compelling ways to be able to share knowledge and disseminate knowledge. And especially when it comes to, you know, what might be seen as intimidating stuff, technology. It's not everyone's forte, and what I'm, you know, I certainly don't understand every single aspect of ecology or every single aspect of technology. But I think it's, you know, being brave to enter those conversations and just going for it and just trying it. So that's one and another is, you know, getting involved with organisations that might see room for a digital revolution, whether that's the urban nature that they manage, whether it's a municipality, whether that's with a landscape architectural firm, whether that's with a bigger tech company, there are an incredible amount of organisations that are in the management of ecology in some way. And I think technology can be an absolute boost in in optimising those processes. So, I'm excited to be the ecological engineer that helps them through that, what can sometimes be a scary digital revolution.

Nathalie Post  
Yeah, great. And okay, so we're kind of nearing towards the end of basically our time here I would say, but if people want to learn more about you, or the type of work you're doing or even get involved or collaborate or whatsoever, what should they do?

Nadina Galle
So I'm very active on LinkedIn and Twitter so they can follow me on LinkedIn, Nadina Galle, and on Twitter @earthtonadina, a long time inside joke that's still going strong. So you can follow me there and also visit my website, nadinagalle.com.

Nathalie Post
Amazing. Thank you so much, Nadina.

Nadina Galle  
Thanks for having me, Nathalie.

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