La Gamba Tropenstation launches a digital twin of the Costa Rican COBIGA corridor to monitor the biodiversity growth.

This partnership began to shape in July 2023, when Anton W., from La Gamba Tropenstation, met Andrew K., from R-evolution, at La Gamba, Costa Rica. Both teams shared a common passion and mission from the start, which helped to set the right baseline, where science met technology with a common goal of boosting the biodiversity of our most valued habitats.
For the last 30 years, La Gamba Tropenstation has been developing and expanding the COBIGA corridor in Costa Rica, and now through this partnership we expect to rapidly accelerate its expansion. This is done by applying a combination of Hexagon technologies, scientific tools and the “Green Cubes Methodology”, providing a detailed understanding of the volume, health and biodiversity trends of the rain forest.
Volume, applying State-of-the-art Hexagon Airborne LiDAR, Country Mapper, sensor provides the volume of the forest at scale, measuring at ground-breaking accuracy down to 3cm. This builds the 3D digital landscape of the rainforest, helps to identify changes either growth or decline in vegetation over time and sets a baseline for the understanding of the forest structure.
Health, Hexagon airborne sensors register multiple light spectrums, helping to identify the rainforest canopy complexity that results in the index of the variety of different species. Below the canopy, high-resolution terrestrial LiDAR, BLK2GO, is applied at selected sites. This provides ground truthing that improves the quality of the forest structure measurement, sets new standards of measuring tree volume, while reinforcing the data captured above ground and resulting with a good understanding of the health of the forest.
Biodiversity trends, Passive acoustic traps capture the forest sounds and using AI, derive species abundance and variety for birds, frogs, insects and bats. Camera traps focus on the presence of large mammals and birds and using the trophic pyramid modelling and returns a calculation of the biomass volume. Lastly, Soil samples measure the subterranean biodiversity these samples are sent for DNA analysis and use AI to provide the microfauna, bacteria and fungi biodiversity index.
Together, these different datapoints provide an accurate, transparent, and trusted digital twin of the rainforest, giving a timely representation of the volume, health and biodiversity trends. This is powered by Hexagon’s digital reality platform (HxDR), that manages all different data sources and provides with the interface for visualization and report generation.
The result of this can be used for scientific research and for corporations interested in sponsoring rainforest conservation projects, as they get access to a transparent and highly trusted source of data, necessary for their reporting needs. These corporations can track their sponsorship impact over time and virtually visit the forests they are sponsoring, generating yearly reports following their latest ESG requirements.
Together, La Gamba Tropenstation with Hexagon R-evolution, we are confident that the COBIGA Corridor will accelerate its expansion, supported by additional scientific contributions, sponsorship coming from ESG committed corporations and the actions run by the local communities.

About R-evolution:
R-evolution is the sustainable innovation and green-tech investment subsidiary of Hexagon AB, the global leader in digital reality solutions. Launched in 2021 as a strategic business venture, R-evolution leverages technology innovation, investment, and venture capital to grow and accelerate green-tech opportunities worldwide. R-evolution is active in initiatives for solar, wind, green hydrogen, desalination, blue carbon, and now forests. For more information, visit www.r-evolution.com and Green Cubes.

About R-evolution:
R-evolution is the sustainable innovation and green-tech investment subsidiary of Hexagon AB, the global leader in digital reality solutions. Launched in 2021 as a strategic business venture, R-evolution leverages technology innovation, investment, and venture capital to grow and accelerate green-tech opportunities worldwide. R-evolution is active in initiatives for solar, wind, green hydrogen, desalination, blue carbon, and now forests. For more information, visit www.r-evolution.com and Green Cubes.

About Hexagon:
Hexagon is the global leader in digital reality solutions, combining sensor, software and autonomous technologies. We are putting data to work to boost efficiency, productivity, quality and safety across industrial, manufacturing, infrastructure, public sector and mobility applications.

Our technologies are shaping production- and people-related ecosystems to become increasingly connected and autonomous – ensuring a scalable, sustainable future.

Hexagon (Nasdaq Stockholm: HEXA B) has approximately 24,000 employees in 50 countries and net sales of approximately 5,2 bn EUR. Learn more at hexagon.com and follow us @HexagonAB.