Since GoodLands was founded in 2015, Burhans’s efforts have earned her the attention of the pope and the World Economic Forum, and a host of laurels that include the UN’s Young Champion of the Earth award, an Ashoka Fellowship, and the Sierra Club’s EarthCare award. “If you plant 500 trees in a suburban parish that already has a lot of forest canopy, you’re going to have magnitudes less impact than if you plant 15 trees on an urban parish that has no urban forest canopy around it,” Burhans says. In practice, the decisions GoodLands assists with might be as straightforward as deciding where to plant trees: if a diocese wants to help reforest its region with limited funds, GoodLands can use GIS maps to help leaders understand their holdings and make suggestions about where to focus for maximal environmental benefit. To use mapping information in service of conservation, GoodLands starts by identifying what land a particular diocese might own, assigns the site to a category (hospital, university, or retreat center urban and flat or rural and mountainous), and then uses machine learning to suggest responsible land management options, giving the priests or abbesses or other decision-makers a starting point as they try to discern what might be right for their community. The problem went all the way to the top: when Burhans managed to score an audience at the Vatican to seek access to records that would help her flesh out the maps she’d begun building using public data, with help from Yale student volunteers, she found that none of the Vatican’s own maps had been updated since 1901.

What she found instead, when she began her work in 2014, was that not only did the church have no such network, but most of the parishes she contacted didn’t even have records of what land they owned-a function of the institution’s age and decentralization. I’m gonna go find out who is running that.’” “I was like, ‘They must have the largest conservation network in the world.

“The Catholic Church is the largest nongovernmental provider of health care, largest nongovernmental provider of education, and second-largest network of humanitarian aid-only surpassed if you include all the member organizations of the UN put together-in the world,” she says, fingering a necklace that portrays her confirmation saint, the medieval polymath Hildegard of Bingen.

Photoshop trees plan view