Forests are crowded places, home to roughly 80% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, with millions of species competing with and depending on each other for survival. This incredible biodiversity is often one of the key reasons for protecting forests— to preserve the vast variety of life on Earth. But just what is biodiversity anyway, scientifically-speaking? How do biologists […]

Scientists have a better understanding of the number of stars and galaxies in the universe than the number of species currently on earth. A little more than 1.7 million species have been described by science and estimates of the total number of species on earth vary wildly between 3 and 100 million. Yet each year this staggering amount of diversity takes a hit.  Research suggests that Earth is currently experiencing its sixth mass extinction. (The last extinction took out the dinosaurs 66 million […]

Since its launch in 2014, Global Forest Watch’s data and tools have been used by millions of people across the globe. From apps to research reports to documentaries, users have creatively incorporated GFW’s datasets into their projects. Here are five of our favorite projects, recently selected from our User Story Contest, that use GFW to […]

Stretching from the Mexican state of Veracruz down to Guatemala and into Belize, the forests of Petén-Veracruz compose a large portion of Central America’s lush tropical landscape.  The Petén-Veracruz Moist Forests are considered an “ecoregion” — a subset of the 14 major biomes designated by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). There are 867 terrestrial ecoregions representing distinct collections of species […]

By Benjamin Jones, Carolyn Ciciarelli, Eric Dinerstein and Michael Anderson The jury is still out on whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound, but it certainly makes an impact. That’s especially true for endangered and endemic species, which only have one remaining area of viable habitat left on Earth, like Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur […]