A major €1m ESA contract with Treemetrics in Cork will see the Irish company’s workforce double to 40, as the smart-web forestry business seeks out software engineers to aid its expansion.
The ESA contract, which is actually just one of a number of new deals for the company, targets a way to manage forests in real time through Treemetrics’ web-based forestry measurement platform.
Basically, the company can monitor trees incredibly accurately by satellite, thereby measuring quantities, provide early warnings for forest fires and on the whole help us be a little bit more sustainable with our woods.
“This is an exciting time for Treemetrics, as our ground-breaking Web-Mapping (satellite) software is now widely recognised and highly valued by governments and private forestry owners across Europe, US and Asia,” said Enda Keane, Treemetrics CEO and co-founder.
“Our corporate and small forest owner customers are now realising the commercial value of using space technology, in terms of time savings and cost-efficiencies, for optimum forestry management.”
Treemetrics recently gained a significant contract – worth around €500,000 according to sources – in Romania, while other projects lie in the UK, Finland, New Zealand and Australia.
Fresh interest from South America also adds to a global Irish company on the up. So much so that Treemetrics is even getting involved in the prevention of disease within tree strains, such as ash dieback.
The software engineer roles that Treemetrics will be looking to fill will cover everything from mobile to data analytics and cloud.
“[The] European Space Agency contract is further validation for our new-age, forestry management web platform, having just completed an intense phase of R&D over the past eight years, in collaboration with our academic partners at the University of Michigan and University College Cork.
“Treemetrics are leveraging the latest mega trends, such as cloud technology, space technologies, advances in big data analytics and mobile technology to help forest owners to make better forest management decisions.”
Forest image, via Shutterstock
