I think they were buying carbon offsets at some point and trying to validate that the countries and organizations that were selling the carbon offset were not cutting down those trees, effectively profiting twice.
Presumably the smart ones just sell their promise-not-to-cut-down-my-forest multiple times. Laundered through completely trustworthy NGOs, so nothing can actually be audited properly.
Related: Just the other day I used USGS 3DEP LiDAR data + Claude Code to get a sense for the number of trees on my property. Diffing terrain map and canopy map gives tree elevation. It was a fun project to explore, primarily because I set CC loose and said "here is the bounding box of my property, pad it by 50 feet and then go absolutely nuts against government datasets gathering as much open data as you can" - it figured out the rest. Dug into soil maps, historical satellite imagery, and lidar data.
The tree outside of house is not 9 feet tall per. I have a 2 story house and it easily towers 10 feet higher than my house.
Additionally, there are several Royal Palms that are close to 50ft and they show as being only 15 feet.
Here are the visuals re: trees - https://i.imgur.com/R0W4q4O.png