A Timber Trade Tool
Overview
TREE.3 was developed with seed funding from the 2020 GSAPP Incubator, and in partnership with Eric Pietraszkiewicz who joined in the research phase.
TREE.3 is a platform for exploration and education. The Timber Trade Tool can provide better access to the complex and overlapping data that represent the process and effects of timber products. The current fragmentation of individually robust, but narrow datasets and tools available to environmentalists, economists, policy-makers, planners, builders, designers, and developers has left each of those groups underserved, to the detriment of all.
By merging valuable tools and datasets from related fields that have remained disparate for too long, including global forestry and green space data, international timber and wood product trade data, and energy databases and environmental life-cycle analyses, the application converts data charts, complex programs, and a static map Into an interactive portal for education, exploration, and advocacy.
Key Features
Early wire-framing helped clarify the product’s goals as well as basic functions and layout. We aimed to provide multiple layers of information that can be toggled on and off by a user, and through which a user can interactively explore the connections between forest coverage, material import/exports, and energy usage. The UI/UX developed in tandem with the data preparation and analysis, allowing us to ensure that we were able to include all the data and visualization features necessary to achieve the product’s goals.
Additional Context
Industrialized harvesting has devastated the world's forests, particularly in tropical regions throughout South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. While global deforestation rates have slowed in the past 3 decades, and are primarily linked to cattle and agriculture, the increasing demand for engineered wood construction products means that architecture will be responsible for a larger total volume and percentage of deforestation in the coming decades, unless alternative practices are considered. Raw carbon metrics and on-site sustainability are ultimately meaningless if they are the result of devastation at the source. The global trade of wood is immense. In 2018 alone, roughly 6 Billion cubic meters, or 200 Billion cubic feet of wood products were harvested and traded globally.
Roughly 1/3rd of the world’s land is covered by forests. And while there has been some meaningful forest growth over the past twenty years, there has been comparatively overwhelming loss due to natural and artificial deforestation. About ⅙ of the world’s forest has vanished in the past 150 years, over half of that since 1980. When we try to evaluate the efficacy of wood-based construction, what do we miss when we ignore the costs at the source? How can an individual understand their relationship to the larger picture?
We explored a number of processes related to the flow of material and energy, focusing both of the extraction and movement of raw materials as well as the production and transportation of wood-based products. The approach we took is to combine these scales and produce a system that tracks large scale nation-to-nation trade of wood and wood-based products, providing users with multi-scalar and material-specific flows of raw material and associated carbon and energy costs.
We organized our data around a number of key product goals, combining and splitting various data sets in order to create new productive data sets that could then be visualized and analyzed meaningfully in TREE.3. Above are our initial nation-to-nation Import and Export models, which simply track all wood-based material as it moves from one country to another. This data provides the backbone upon which we layered more detailed and nuanced data sets, based on specific materials and products, as well as specific case study flows to chart energy and carbon metrics.
We developed additional datasets for each specific product or material type that we want to track, also categorized by nation-to-nation movement. These, and other datasets all provided overlapping and yet unique perspectives on the types of materials being extracted, produced, and shipped around the world.
Ultimately, TREE.3 is a platform for exploration and education. The Timber Trade Tool can provide better access to the complex and overlapping data that represent the process and effects of timber products. The current fragmentation of individually robust, but narrow datasets and tools available to environmentalists, economists, policy-makers, planners, builders, designers, and developers has left each of those groups underserved, to the detriment of all.