(Asia) Sankar Sreeramula, Chief Data Scientist at Asia Pulp and Paper, speaks with Maria Espona, ArgIQ Professor and CDO Magazine Editorial Board member, about data science ethics and the impact of digital forestry on plantation monitoring.

Sharing his approach to merging ethical concepts with data science, he breaks it down into four specific areas. The first includes trust, transparency, and ethics. The next is value, outcomes, accountability, and decision making. The third area is collaboration and culture. And the last is understanding customers.

Sreeramula has been involved in several critical projects at Asia Pulp and Paper. Of them, he highlights the digital forestry initiative. He indicates that digital forestry is implemented to remotely monitor the company’s plantations located a few thousand kilometers away from the headquarters. Data scientists can get data remotely, analyze it, and send recommendations to the users, he adds. 

According to Sreeramula, today, it is possible to monitor every tree in the plantations and keep an eye on the interactions of the field workers. In that way, digital forestry is the digital transformation that enables top-level to bottom-level visibility, he continues. Sreeramula recalls that only 1% of the plantation area used to be monitored randomly; now it is possible to monitor 100% of the area with up to 90 to 95% accuracy.

Additionally, Sreeramula says that field workers do not have to check the entire plantation area. They can act on specific problem areas based on the coordinates generated via digital forestry.