Using Google’s map technology and cloud platform, Global Forest Watch can track tree use, abuse, and regrowth.
Combining satellite technology, public data, and crowdsourcing, the arena Resources Institute, Google and greater than 40 partner organizations have launched Global Forest Watch, a web-based community-oriented map designed to trace changes in forests world wide in near real-time.
Global Forest Watch provides data layers that describe forest change, forest cover (tree density), forest use, conservation data, and reports about forest-related issues from users. It provides insight into the health of the world’s forests, which remain vital economic, social, and environmental assets for each nation.
The website exists because forest health have been declining. Greater than 500 million acres of forest were lost between 2000 and 2012, in accordance with data from the University of Maryland and Google, and only 197 million acres of forest were regrown, replanted, or revived in this period. This isn’t a sustainable trend.
“That is the equivalent of losing 50 soccer fields’ worth of forests every minute of each day for the past 13 years!” said Crystal Davis, director of worldwide Forest Watch on the World Resources Institute, and Dave Thau, developer advocate for Google Earth Engine, said in a blog post.
The news isn’t all bad, however. Davis and Thau point mention that while Brazil, with its vast Amazon rainforest, has long been one of the vital top countries for deforestation, the velocity of deforestation there declined by a typical of one,318 square kilometers per year previously ten years. Though the velocity rose last year, Brazil’s example demonstrates that continued forest loss isn’t always inevitable.
At a similar time, the necessity to manage deforestation is clear within the increasing rates of tree loss in countries like Angola, Indonesia, Malaysia, Paraguay, Peru, and Tanzania.
Global Forest Watch depends upon over 650,000 Landsat 7 satellite images processed by Google Earth Engine, the company’s cloud-based platform for geo-data analysis. Some 20 terapixels of image data were processed, requiring a million CPU-core hours on 10,000 computers operating in parallel for several days to hide the study’s 13-year period of time. Google researchers estimate that the calculations would have taken a single computer 15 years to finish.
The system builds on Forest Monitoring for Action (FORMA), a satellite-based forest assessment system introduced in 2009 by the middle for Global Development.
Global Forest Watch hopes to enhance its satellite data with social data that establishes “ground-truth” – personal accounts, photos, and videos that document forest restoration or abuse.
Google has a protracted history of using its mapping technology for public health and crisis response. Not all of its efforts were unqualified successes. Despite its high public profile and good intentions, Google Flu Trends have been criticized for inaccuracies arising from an inadequate data model. Global Forest Watch should avoid that trap as it depends totally on satellite images, which unlike search queries don’t depend heavily on interpretation.
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Thomas Claburn was writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications equivalent to New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv, having earned a not particularly useful … View Full Bio
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