A new Global Forest Watch map allows anyone to watch deforestation happen in almost real time.
"Thanks to dramatic advances in technology, we can, for the first time, see what is happening in forests in near real-time," Doctor Nigel Sizer, director of the global forest initiative World Resources Institute said in an ESRI news release. "GIS helps us take very powerful data and make sense of it. The analytical capabilities of GIS enrich our understanding of the earth's forests of not only where but why and how."
The Global Forest Watch is led by the World Resources Institute and consists of a partnership between about 40 organizations.
"Monitoring forest health and designing sustainable solutions is a challenging task, but an essential one," Esri president Jack Dangermond said in the news release. "The Global Forest Watch initiative demonstrates the capacity of open data, shared systems, and platform technologies to bring many experts together to design solutions for a universal problem."
Lack of accuracy in tracking deforestation could have grave consequences. By the time word of unlawful deforestation reaches authorities and they investigate the damage has usually already been done, the Guardian reported.
The satellite data is so precise that map users can track individual trees in some regions.
"What is new here is that we're taking an enormous amount of complex and very confusing information and making it accessible to everyone, everywhere. You don't need a PhD in astrophysics to understand Global Forest Watch", Sizer told the Guardian.
In recent years companies have started to acknowledge the impact they have in encouraging deforestation. In 2010 the Consumer Goods Forum (which consists of "400 multinational retailers and manufacturers") agreed to "[mobilize] resources" in an effort to halt deforestation by the year 2020, the Guardian reported.
The type of information the map provides is crucial if the this goal is to be realistically reached. The map was created using software by Google.
