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Forest tree or wood carvings image collection

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Monitoring the Worlds Forests with Global Forest Watch

Posted by Crystal Davis, Director of Global Forest Watch, the World Resources Institute, and Dave Thau, Developer Advocate, Google Earth Engine

Cross-posted at the Google Lat Long Blog

By the time we find out about deforestation, it’s usually too late to take action.

Scientists have been studying forests for centuries, chronicling the vital importance of these ecosystems for human society. But most of us still lack timely and reliable information about where, when, and why forests are disappearing.

This is about to change with the launch of Global Forest Watch—an online forest monitoring system created by the World Resources Institute, Google and a group of more than 40 partners. Global Forest Watch uses technologies including Google Earth Engine and Google Maps Engine to map the world’s forests with satellite imagery, detect changes in forest cover in near-real-time, and make this information freely available to anyone with Internet access.

By accessing the most current and reliable information, everyone can learn what’s happening in forests around the world. Now that we have the ability to peer into forests, a number of telling stories are beginning to emerge.

Global forest loss far exceeds forest gain

Pink = tree cover loss

Blue = Tree cover gain

According to data from the University of Maryland and Google, the world lost more than 500 million acres of forest between 2000 and 2012. That’s the equivalent of losing 50 soccer fields’ worth of forests every minute of every day for the past 13 years! By contrast, only 0.8 million km2 have regrown, been planted, or restored during the same period.


The United States’ most heavily forested region is made up of production forests

Pink = tree cover loss Blue = Tree cover gain

The Southern United States is home to the nation’s most heavily forested region, making up 29 percent of the total U.S. forest land. Interestingly, the majority of this region is “production forests.” The mosaic of loss (pink) and gain (blue) in the above map shows how forests throughout this region are used as crops – grown and harvested in five-year cycles to produce timber or wood pulp for paper production.

This practice of “intensive forestry” is used all over the world to provide valuable commodities and bolster regional and national economies. WRI analysis suggests that if managers of production forests embrace a “multiple ecosystem services strategy”, they will be able to generate additional benefits such as biodiversity, carbon storage, and water filtration.


Forests are protected in Brazil’s indigenous territories

Pink = tree cover loss Dark green = forest Light green = Degraded land or pastures

The traditional territory of Brazils Surui tribe is an island of green surrounded by lands that have been significantly degraded and deforested over the past 10+ years. Indigenous communities often rely on forests for their livelihoods and cultural heritage and therefore have a strong incentive to manage forests sustainably. However, many indigenous communities struggle to protect their lands against encroachment by illegal loggers, which may be seen in Global Forest Watch using annual data from the University of Maryland and Google, or monthly alerts from Imazon, a Brazilian NGO and GFW partner.


Make Your Own Forest Map

Previously, the data required to make these maps was difficult to obtain and interpret, and most people lacked the resources necessary to access, view, and analyze the the information. With Global Forest Watch, this data is now open to anyone with Internet access. We encourage you to visit Global Forest Watch and make your own forest map. There are many stories to tell about what is happening to forests around the world—and your stories can lead to action to protect these special and threatened places. What story will you tell?

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The first detailed maps of global forest change

Posted by Matt Hansen and Peter Potapov, University of Maryland; Rebecca Moore and Matt Hancher, Google

Most people are familiar with exploring images of the Earth’s surface in Google Maps and Earth, but of course there’s more to satellite data than just pretty pictures. By applying algorithms to time-series data it is possible to quantify global land dynamics, such as forest extent and change. Mapping global forests over time not only enables many science applications, such as climate change and biodiversity modeling efforts, but also informs policy initiatives by providing objective data on forests that are ready for use by governments, civil society and private industry in improving forest management.

In a collaboration led by researchers at the University of Maryland, we built a new map product that quantifies global forest extent and change from 2000 to 2012. This product is the first of its kind, a global 30 meter resolution thematic map of the Earth’s land surface that offers a consistent characterization of forest change at a resolution that is high enough to be locally relevant as well. It captures myriad forest dynamics, including fires, tornadoes, disease and logging.

Global 30 meter resolution thematic maps of the Earth’s land surface: Landsat composite reference image (2000), summary map of forest loss, extent and gain (2000-2012), individual maps of forest extent, gain, loss, and loss color-coded by year. Click to enlarge

The satellite data came from the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) sensor onboard the NASA/USGS Landsat 7 satellite. The expertise of NASA and USGS, from satellite design to operations to data management and delivery, is critical to any earth system study using Landsat data. For this analysis, we processed over 650,000 ETM+ images in order to characterize global forest change.

Key to the study’s success was the collaboration between remote sensing scientists at the University of Maryland, who developed and tested models for processing and characterizing the Landsat data, and computer scientists at Google, who oversaw the implementation of the final models using Google’s Earth Engine computation platform. Google Earth Engine is a massively parallel technology for high-performance processing of geospatial data, and houses a copy of the entire Landsat image catalog. For this study, a total of 20 terapixels of Landsat data were processed using one million CPU-core hours on 10,000 computers in parallel, in order to characterize year 2000 percent tree cover and subsequent tree cover loss and gain through 2012. What would have taken a single computer 15 years to perform was completed in a matter of days using Google Earth Engine computing.

Global forest loss totaled 2.3 million square kilometers and gain 0.8 million square kilometers from 2000 to 2012. Among the many results is the finding that tropical forest loss is increasing with an average of 2,101 additional square kilometers of forest loss per year over the study period. Despite the reduction in Brazilian deforestation over the study period, increasing rates of forest loss in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Tanzania, Angola, Peru and Paraguay resulted in a statistically significant trend in increasing tropical forest loss. The maps and statistics from this study fill an information void for many parts of the world. The results can be used as an initial reference for countries lacking such information, as a spur to capacity building in such countries, and as a basis of comparison in evolving national forest monitoring methods. Additionally, we hope it will enable further science investigations ranging from the evaluation of the integrity of protected areas to the economic drivers of deforestation to carbon cycle modeling.

The Chaco woodlands of Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina are under intensive pressure from agroindustrial development. Paraguay’s Chaco woodlands within the western half of the country are experiencing rapid deforestation in the development of cattle ranches. The result is the highest rate of deforestation in the world. Click to enlarge

Global map of forest change: http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest

If you are curious to learn more, tune in next Monday, November 18 to a live-streamed, online presentation and demonstration by Matt Hansen and colleagues from UMD, Google, USGS, NASA and the Moore Foundation:

Live-stream Presentation: Mapping Global Forest Change

Live online presentation and demonstration, followed by Q&A

Monday, November 18, 2013 at 1pm EST, 10am PST

Link to live-streamed event: http://goo.gl/JbWWTk

Please submit questions here: http://goo.gl/rhxK5X

For further results and details of this study, see High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change in the November 15th issue of the journal Science.

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