Google Makes Effort to Protect Forests

Google making a run at the Internet providing industry was really not the end of it. Google is now making an effort to save mother nature as well. 

The combination of satellite technology, public data, and crowdsourcing, the World Resources Institute, Google and more than 40 partner organizations has officially brought about the Global Forest Watch, an online community-oriented map made to track changes in forests around the world in real-time. 

Global Forest Watch will data that will describe forest change, forest cover, forest use, conservation data and reports from users on forest related issues. This information will be a vital asset to every nation in regards to economic, social, and environmental purposes by providing insight into the health of the worlds forests. 

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Beyond 500 million acres of forest were lost between 2000 and 2012, according to data from the University of Maryland and Google, and only 197 million acres of forest have been regrown, replanted, or revived during this period. Because of this decline, the website was made as they believe something must be done to defend against this trend. 

“That’s the equivalent of losing 50 soccer fields’ worth of forests every minute of every day for the past 13 years!” said Crystal Davis, director of Global Forest Watch at the World Resources Institute.

Global Forest Watch utilizes over 650,000 Landsat 7 satellite images processed by Google Earth Engine, the company’s cloud-based platform for geo-data analysis. About 20 terapixels of image data was processed. Google says that the amount of work that has been on accomplished the past several days by the 10,000 computers operating would have taken a single computer about 15 years.

Next on Global Forest Watch’s agenda is to use its satellite data with social data to establish “ground-truth”, which is personal accounts, photos, and videos that document forest restoration or abuse. 

Google’s history with mapping technology for public health and crisis response goes far. Not every project has been a massive success, and one of them, Google Flu Trends has been criticized for inaccurate data. Perhaps Global Forest Watch will avoid that trap because it depends on satellite images. 

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Google Makes Effort to Protect Forests