In 2010, SilviaTerra co-founder Zack Parisa was a Yale School of Forestry graduate student tasked with developing management plans for mixed hardwood forests in the Caucasus. In that context, limited forest inventory information was available, and obtaining an inventory by traditional means was prohibitively expensive.

Zack’s innovation - which now underpins our patented CruiseBoost technology - was to take a limited number of traditional ground plots and combine this data in a novel way with information derived from commercially available (and reasonably priced) remotely-sensed data. The result was a less expensive inventory with equivalent or better accuracy than traditional methods. Over the next several years, Zack teamed up with fellow co-founder Max Nova to commercialize the technology, and it's been deployed since then across millions of acres of US forests.

Along the way, we contracted out a lot of cruises - and started getting faxes of tally-sheets back. Organizing and cleaning the incoming data was a mess! We wanted a fast, easy, and cost-efficient way to send out complete cruise information and get clean data back - with no email coordination, expensive hardware, or cumbersome software.

So we built Plot Hound, our web cruising platform and free companion app. Today, thousands of cruisers at the nation's biggest forestry organizations use Plot Hound to cruise hundreds of thousands of plots each year.

We built SilviaTerra to give foresters the data they need to apply their expertise to the landscape.