Sophie Gogibedashvili decided she wanted to be a forester during a hike in her second year of university. In the middle of Georgia’s Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park she was overwhelmed with emotion. “The forest was talking to me,” Sophie recalls. She is still touched by the memory even now, in her office at Georgia’s Center for […]

Christel Scheske is a 2018 GFW Tech Fellow. The GFW Tech Fellowship is designed to equip dedicated forest protection advocates from around the world with the skills and technologies to help halt deforestation. Christel lives and works in Peru as a project coordinator for the Conservamos por Naturaleza initiative of  Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental […]

Since 2015, World Resources Institute (WRI) and Orbital Insight have worked together with a grant from the Generation Foundation to find new applications of computer vision and deep learning that will support Global Forest Watch in better monitoring the world’s forests. This blog is Part I of a series that explores our latest project working […]

Twenty years ago, Dr. Florian Siegert, a German-trained biologist, was conducting ecology research in Borneo when a series of fires blazed across Indonesia. The Asian Forest Fires of 1997-1998 burned thousands of miles of rainforest, creating a haze and air quality disaster that caused $5-6 billion in economic losses and endangered the long-term health of […]

Part 2 of this blog series available here. In 2013, Dr. Matt Hansen and collaborators at the University of Maryland’s Global Land Analysis and Discovery group (GLAD), Google, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released the first global scale method for annually monitoring changes in tree cover using 30-meter […]

Part 1 of this blog series available here. In Part 1 of the GLAD tree cover data accuracy blog series, we explained two different accuracy assessments of the global tree cover loss and gain data produced by Dr. Matt Hansen and collaborators at the University f Maryland’s Global Land Analysis and Discovery group (GLAD), Google, the U.S. […]

By Jamie Gibson We’re very happy to announce our latest addition to the GFW family: GFW Climate! Working closely with the crew at WRI, we’ve created a bespoke application so you can analyse carbon emissions resulting from deforestation. Back in June we promised you compelling, intuitive visualizations that bring forest carbon data to life: take a look and tell […]

By Jessica Webb How can open government accelerate implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the post-2015 development agenda? That’s the big question on the table at this year’s Global Summit of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), an initiative dedicated to increasing government transparency and citizen empowerment. One overlooked answer to that question is “forests.” Forests […]

By Nigel Sizer, Fred Stolle and Tjokorda Nirarta “Koni” Samadhi Children are forced to wear masks due to the toxic smoke from peat land fires. Palangka Raya, Central Kalimantan. Courtesy of CIFOR (Flickr) As President Obama and Indonesian President Joko Widodo meet today, climate change will be high on their agenda. A related, unexpected issue should also be on […]